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THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 



THE 



GREAT REPUBLIC 



SIR LEPEL HENRY GRIFFIN, K.C.S.I. 



The Commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beg^. 

TiMO^CTlP- Ati*:ns. 

*' O Liberie ! que de crimes on commet en ton n^Ty 




NEW YORK: SCRIBNE^Am) WELFORD. 
1884V ^ 







LONDON : 

R. Clay, Sons, and Taylof 

BREAD STREET HILL, E.C. 



PREFACE. 

Some portions of this little book have already 
appeared in the Fortnightly Reviezv, and are here 
reproduced with the consent and, indeed, at the 
suggestion of the editor. My criticisms of various 
American characteristics attracted much attention 
in the United States, and a mass of hostile com- 
ment in the shape of verses and newspaper 
.articles. I would, then, at the threshold of this 
book, hasten to assure Americans that it is written 
in no unfriendly spirit to them. If what I have 
said be distasteful to them, I am sorry for it, 
for I have had no intention to wound. I am 
writing for Englishmen and especially for English 
Liberals,' and wish to point out for their avoidance 
those of the political methods of America which 



vi PREFACE. 

strike me as thoroughly bad and corrupt. It is 
necessary that Enghshmen should understand, at 
the present time, the demoralisation which may fall 
upon a country which is so unwise as to surrender 
political power into the hands of the uneducated 
masses, and if, in pressing home this lesson, I 
have been compelled to speak somewhat roughly 
and frankly, the fault is less mine than that of 
the institutions I criticise. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM I 



CHAPTER n. 

THE BIG THINGS OF AMERICA 17 

CHAPTER HI. 

SCENERY AND CITIES 35 



CHAPTER IV 



LIBERTY 



CHAPTER V. 

EQUALITY 



45 



viii CONTEXTS. 



CHAPTER VI. 



I'AGK 

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 90 



CHAPTER VH. 

THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY IO4 

CHAPTER Vin. 

THE FOREIGN ELEMENT I30 

CHAPTER IX. 

JUSTICE 143 

CHAPTER X. 

THE COST OF DEMOCRACY 163 

CHAPTER XI. 

FOREIGN POLICY ' 177 



THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 



THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

CHAPTER I. 

INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM. 

Whether the discovery of America by 
Columbus has been of advantage or loss to the 
so-called civilised peoples of the Old World would 
form an interesting thesis for discussion. When we 
remember the gentle and refined races of Mexico 
and Peru tra!npled beneath the gross feet of Pizarro, 
Cortes, and the Inquisition ; or regard the savage pic- 
turesqueness ofthe'Indian tribes that wandered over 
the North American continent, cruel, brutal, and 
happy, uninjured by and uninjuring Western culture, 
we cannot but look with some doubt and hesitation 
at America of to-day, the apotheosis of Philistinism, 
the perplexity and despair of statesmen, the Mecca 
to which turns every religious or social charlatan, 

B 2 



4 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

where the only god worshipped is Mammon, and 
the highest education is the share list ; where 
political life, which should be the breath of the 
nostrils of every freeman, is shunned by an honest 
man as the plague; where, to enrich jobbers and 
monopolists and contractors, a nation has eman- 
cipated its slaves and enslaved its freemen ; where 
the people is gorged and drunk with materialism, 
and where wealth has become a curse instead of 
a blessing. 

America is the country of disillusion and dis- 
appointment, in politics, literature, culture, and art ; 
in its scenery, its cities, and its people. With some 
experience of every country in the civilised world, 
I can think of none except Russia in which I would 
not prefer to reside, in which life would not be 
more w^orth living, less sordid and mean and 
unlovely. 

In order that this opinion may not appear harsh, 
exaggerated, and unfriendly, it is necessary to say 
a few words on the subject of international criticism. 
There appears to exist an idea that the friendliness 
and indeed the amalgamation, social and political, 
of the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race 
are so to be desired, that all mutual criticism of 
politics or manners should be uniformly favourable, 
even though the praise be undeserved, I will leave 



INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM. 5 

Others to discuss whether there can be more in un- 
candid criticism than loss of self-respect ; and only 
inquire whether, if we are unable to say pleasant 
things of America, it be not better to remain alto- 
gether silent. I beheve silence to be both harmful 
and useless. In the first place, America is not an 
inert mass, devoid of attractive power. It is, to 
the last decree, energetic, dynamic, and aggressive, 
while its attractive force is so felt within the orbit 
of England that a large and increasing number of 
politicians and pubHcists are looking to America 
for the dawn of a new social and political millen- 
nium, and are recommending American remedies 
for all our national disorders. Each year the de- 
mocratic tide rises higher and our institutions 
become more Americanised ; while some English 
statesmen are admittedly careless how high the 
tide may rise, and what existing institutions it 
may sweep away. It is as well that Englishmen 
should understand what is the dream of 
advanced New York Republicans as represented 
by the World : — 

*' Ca ira ! Ecrasez les infiwies ! ! 

" The storm of revolution is looming and lowering over 
Europe which will crush out and obliterate for ever the hydra- 
headed monarchies and nobilities of the Old World. In 
Russia the Nihihst is astir. In France the Communist is the 
coming man. In Germany the Social Democrat will soon 



6 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

rise again in his millions as in the days of Ferdinand Lassalle. 
In Italy the Internationalist is frequently heard from. In 
Spain the marks of the Black Hand have been visible on 
many an occasion. In Ireland the Fenian and Avenger 
terrorise, and in England the Land League is growing. All 
cry aloud for the blue blood of the monarch and the aristocrat. 
They wish to see it pouring again on the scaffold. Will it be 
by the guillotine that cut off the head of Louis XVI. ? Or 
by the headsman's axe that decapitated Charles L ? Or by 
the dynamite that searched out the vitals of Alexander the 
Second ? Or will it be by the hangman's noose around the 
neck of the next British monarch ? 

" No one can tell but that the coming English sans-adottes, 
the descendants of Wamba the Fool and Gurth the Swine- 
herd, will discover the necessary method and relentlessly em- 
ploy it. They will make the nobles — who fatten and luxuriate 
in the castles and abbeys and on the lands stolen from the Saxon, 
sacrilegiously robbed from the Catholic Church and kept from 
the peasantry of the villages and the labourer of the towns — 
wish they had never been born. They will be the executioners 
of the fate so justly merited by the aristocratic criminals of 
the past and the present. The cry that theirs is blue blood 
and that they are the privileged caste will not avail the men 
and women of rank when the English Republic is born. They 
will have to expiate their tyrannies, their murders, their lusts, 
and their crimes in accordance with the law given on Sinai 
amid the thunders of heaven : ' The sins of the fathers shall 
be visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth 



Even if such ravings as these are dismissed as 
unworthy of notice, it is not the less certain that 
the most amiable and intelligent Americans are 

^ It is necessary to note that the Kciu York World is edited by a 
German. 



INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM. 7 

looking forward to a near future in which the 
Republican lion, having digested the aristocratic 
lamb, shall lie down in dignified repose with no one 
to question his claim to be the first of created 
beings in a renewed world, the secret of which he 
pretends to be equality applied to all except 
himself. For an illustration of this, it is sufficient 
to refer to one of the latest and most pleasing 
American books, entitled, Alt American Four-in- 
Hand in Britain, by Mr. Andrew Carnegie, which 
describes, with great vivacity, how a party of 
simple and impressionable Republicans chartered 
a coach at Brighton and were driven, to their 
immense satisfaction, through England and Scot- 
land. Throughout this book, which is by a 
friendly hand, and treats British weaknesses 
with kindly compassion, runs the strong stream 
of belief in the triumph of Republicanism in 
England, and its regeneration *' under the purify- 
ing influences of equality," which Mr. Carnegie 
declares is the panacea of all disorders, even 
a constitutional monarchy. If he would only 
visit Boss Kelly, surrounded by the gang of 
Irish thieves who rule and rob New York, and 
explain to them that he was in every sense their 
equal, I cannot but think that, during his 
hurried exit from the presence of the municipal 



S THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

gods, he would modify his somewhat simple 
political beliefs.^ 

If, then, there be those, like myself, who believe 
that no greater curse could befall England than for 
her to borrow political methods, dogmas and in- 
stitutions from America, there seems every reason 
why such should explain the grounds, good or bad, 
for their belief, with which American travel may 
have furnished them. The good in American 
institutions is of English origin and descent ; what 
is bad is indigenous, and this she now desires to 
teach us. But Britannia, who, since her daughter 
has become independent and carried her affections 
elsewhere, has escaped the dreary roleoi chaperone, 
may surely refuse invitations to see Columbia dance, 
in fancy dress, to the tune of Yankee Doodle, and 
may plead her age and figure when asked to learn 
the new step. There are doubtless in English 
politics and society many evils and anomalies — 
privileges which cannot be defended, wrongs and 
injustice and misery which must be redressed and 
relieved ; but, nevertheless, the English constitu- 
tion, with its ordered and balanced society from 
the throne to the cottage, is the symbol and 

^ Mr. Andrew Carnegie, though he plumes his republican 
feathers with so much complacency, is, in reality, a Scotchman 
who still remains a subject of the Queen. 



INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM. 9 

expression of liberty in the world. Republican 
institutions have had a trial for a hundred years, 
and, so far as outsiders can judge, their failure is 
complete. France under a Republic has become a 
by-word in Europe for weakness and truculcnce 
abroad, and financial imbecility and corruption at 
home ; while America, which boasts of equality 
and freedom, does not understand that, with the 
single exception of Russia, there is no country 
where private right and public interests are more 
systematically outraged than in the United States. 
The ideal aristocracy, or government of the best, 
has in America been degraded into an actual gov- 
ernment of the worst, in which the educated, the 
cultured, the honest, and even the wealthy, weigh 
as nothing in the balance against the scum of 
Europe which the Atlantic has washed up on 
the shores of the New World. 

International social criticism, which rests on a 
basis altogether different from political, is very apt, 
between England and America, to be prejudiced 
and unjust. Both races are strangely provincial 
for people who travel so much, and create 
grievances out of mere differences in habits and 
manners, while they are so near of kin as to 
be acutely sensibly of departures from their own 
standard of taste or morals. English travellers are 



10 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

apt to expect too much ; and men who travel 
uncomplainingly in Spain, where night is chiefly 
distinguished from day by its change of annoyance, 
or in Bulgaria, where the only procurable bath is 
a stable bucket, complain bitterly at not finding 
in the rude hostelries of the Western States of 
America the conveniences and • the aiisine of 
Bignon or the Bristol. But, apart from unreason- 
able claims, which, throughout life, make up so 
large a part of our unhappiness, there exists a 
fruitful source of irritation to Englishmen travel- 
ling in America in the depreciatory attitude to all 
things English that is taken by the vast majority 
of Americans. It is a new and doubtless a whole- 
some experience for Englishmen, for on the con- 
tinent of Europe, however much we may be 
disliked, we are regarded with a hostile respect and 
consideration which are flattering to the national 
vanity. Our habits and prejudices are indulged 
and consulted. The splendid hotels of the Rhine, 
of Switzerland and Italy were built for English 
travellers and in deference to English tastes and 
requirements, although of late years our American 
cousins have shared with us the venal attention of 
Continental landlords. But in America all this is 
changed. English tourists are few in number, and 
are lost in the vast society of travelling Americans. 



INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM. ii 

Their habits, when they differ from those of the 
nativ^es, are considered antiquated or objectionable ; 
and every American usage or institution is held 
up to admiration, not only as good in itself, but 
as better than anything to be found in *' the 
old country." The stranger would be far more 
disposed to accord an ungrudging admiration to 
the many improvements and conveniences which 
America has introduced into common life, if it 
were not demanded so peremptorily with regard to 
numerous matters on which there maybe a reason- 
able difference of opinion, or on which impartial 
observers would give the preference to English 
methods. But whether it be hotels or railway cars, 
horses or carriage-building, banks or beautiful 
women, oysters or engineering, the ordinary 
American loudly asserts his superiority over 
England, and treats an Englishman as an imbecile 
creature to whom he was deigning to expound 
the elementary principles of social and political 
life. Mr. Washington Adams in England, 
a novel by Mr. R. G. White, amusingly re- 
viewed last October in the Saturday Revieiv, 
is as good an illustration as could be found 
of the worst type of American critic — ignorant 
and presumptuous — who, from the internal evidence 
of his book, could never have crossed the ocean, 



12 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

discussing English life and manners. It is some 
consolation to find that Mr. White does not reserve 
his thunders for a subject of which he knows 
nothing, and that to the September number of 
TJie North Ameincan Review he has contributed 
an article on " Class Distinctions in the United 
States," which, for fierce and contemptuous abuse 
of the mushroom millionaires whose evil example 
is demoralising American society, exceeds any- 
thing which a partially-informed Englishman could 
fairly or with propriety write. I do not, however, 
desire, by criticising American society further than 
it influences political and national life, to lay 
myself open to the charges of bad taste or super- 
ficiality which may justly be brought against Mr. 
White ; and my friends in New York, Washington, 
Philadelphia, and the West, whose kindness and 
hospitality will always be remembered, would, 
I am sure, be included by Mr. Matthew Arnold 
in " the remnant " upon which he was inaudibly 
eloquent in his first New York lecture — the salt 
which is to purify American society, the examples 
of sweetness and light which are to illumine and 
beautify the degenerate western world. But 
whether writers like Mr. White misunderstand 
and misrepresent English society, or whether we 
are as black as we are painted, British equanimity 



INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM. 13 

will probably remain unshaken. In either case 
it is certain that the English are not popular in 
the United States, although there is a far more 
friendly feeling between the two nations than 
existed some years ago. This is most evident 
in the eastern towns, such as Boston and New 
York, where the imitation of English manners 
and amusements has become for the time the 
fashion. Horse-racing has grown to large pro- 
portions, fox-hunting, lawn-tennis, and cricket, are 
making slow progress, and the New York dude 
might almost compare, for fatuous imbecility, with 
the London masher. So far and low have English 
fashions penetrated, that Mr. Stokes, the affable 
proprietor of the Hoffman House, keeps no waiters 
in his employ who will not consent to shave their 
moustaches and cut their whiskers a rAnglaise. 
But in the Central and Western States, with the 
exception of Colorado, which is being largely 
developed by English settlers and capital, there 
is little love for England or English ways, and 
criticism is almost uniformly unfriendly. As an 
example of this may be mentioned the savage 
abuse of Western journals, among which raged 
an epidemic of discourtesy directed against some 
members of Mr. Villard's North Pacific party for 
a misapprehension, amply apologised for, which in 



H THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

England, and affecting American guests, would 
have remained unnoticed. Americans will often 
say that the sentiment of the country cannot fairly 
be ascertained from newspapers ; but in a country 
where the press has attained an unprecedented 
development, and where newspapers are, to all 
appearance, the only literature of the vast majority, 
a foreigner must assume that they represent, with 
some exactness, the popular opinion. There is 
no reason why the English should be popular 
in America. They are almost the most disagree- 
able race extant, and are often unendurable to 
each other ; nor is there any part of Europe, 
except perhaps Hungary, where they are not more 
disliked than in the United States. The opinion 
expressed by the most original- of living American 
poets, the present Minister to the Court of St. 
James's, represents that of most foreigners, and 
it is difficult to see that it is essentially unfair : — 

" Of all the sarse that I can call to mind 
England doos make the most onpleasant kind : 
It's you're the sinner oilers, she's the saint: 
Wat's good's all English, all that isn't ain't. 
— She's praised herself ontil she fairly thinks 
There ain't no light in Natur' when she winks." 

Such characteristics are not amiable, and the 
laws of heredity have transmitted them to our 



INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM. 15 

Transatlantic cousins. It is, indeed, probable that 
the Americans are, intrinsically, as disagreeable as 
ourselves ; for although, on the continent of 
Europe, they are comparatively popular, this is 
probably because they are less known. Annually, 
a flight of pork-packers and successful tradesmen 
cross the Atlantic, with their families, to complete 
an education, which has in reality not begun, by a 
contemplation of Paris hotels and Rhine steam- 
boats. But the American pork merchant is silent 
in the presence of his peacock-voiced wife and 
daughters ; and the complete party, Philistine 
though it be, is infinitely preferable to the swarm 
of London shop-boys with their sweethearts, whose 
uproarious felicity makes hideous all foreign re- 
sorts in the near neighbourhood of England. In 
the continental dislike of England is an element of 
jealousy and suspicion in which America has no 
part. We have fought and bullied in every quarter 
of the world, and, to-day, we stand with crossed 
swords with Russia in Central Asia and Armenia, 
with France in China and Egypt. Eight hundred 
years of victory — for the English never own a defeat 
— has left much soreness on every side, while the 
too fortunate Yankee, navyless and armyless, is 
not regarded, in a city like Paris, as a past or 
future enemy, but merely as the welcome victim of 



i6 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

hungry shopkeepers. If America were as closely 
connected with Europe as is England, her citizens 
would be as much disliked as Englishmen. The 
two nations, however diverse their special character- 
istics may appear to a superficial observer, are 
curiously alike. The true Americans are unaffected 
by the stream of German or Scandinavian or Irish 
emigration, with which they have never mingled. 
They are now, and will remain. Englishmen in 
thought, genius and weaknesses — the physical type 
modified by an uncongenial climate mostly in 
extremes, the commercial spirit intensified by 
unrivalled opportunities for its successful employ- 
ment, and the national genius for mechanical 
invention developed by the high wages of labour, 
precisely as the monkey developed a prehensile 
tail. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE BIG THINGS OF AMERICA. 

An English characteristic, strongly developed 
and even grotesquely caricatured in America, is 
the love of big things, which is, after all, a failing 
akin to virtue, and which will guide America into 
fair pastures wdien adversity and Mr. Matthew 
Arnold shall have chastened and purified Philistia. 
At present, Americans are satisfied with things 
because they are large ; and if not large, they must 
have cost a great deal of money. One evening, at 
the Madison Square Theatre, an American observed 
to me, " That is the most expensive drop-scene in 
the world." It was a glorified curtain of em- 
broidery, with a golden crane and a fairy land- 
scape, and might justly have been claimed as the 
most beautiful drop-scene in the world ; but this 
was not the primary idea in the Yankee mind. 
The two houses most beautiful architecturally in 

C 



i8 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

the Michigan Avenue at Chicago were shown to 
me as half-a-million-dollar houses. A horse is not 
praised for his points, but as having cost so many 
thousand dollars ; a man, who certainly may 
possess no other virtue, as owning so many 
millions. The habit of making size a reason for 
admiration is less jarring to an educated taste than 
that of making money the standard of beauty and 
virtue. 

Full in front of the White House at Washington, 
as a warning to all future Presidents to avoid the 
penalties which attach to patriotism, a column 
of white marble is slowly rising to the memory of 
Washington. It is intended eventually to appear 
as an obelisk of six hundred feet, ''the highest 
structure ever raised by man, excepting the Tower 
of Babel." Whether the design, which would seem 
to have been framed in the spirit which brought 
confusion on the builders of its prototype, will ever 
be completed it is impossible to say. The corner- 
stone was laid thirty-five years ago, and something 
more than half the destined height has been already 
reached. Colonel Casey, in charge of the work, 
promises its early completion ; but if America 
continues to depart from that standard of free and 
honest administration which the high-minded, 
chivalrous, and clean-handed founder of the 



THE BIG THINGS OF AMERICA. 19 

Republic set up, it would seem that for very shame 
the monument will be left unfinished, to symbolise 
as the tower of a shot manufactory or a cotton-mill, 
the triumph of industrial enterprise rather than of 
successful patriotism. In no case will it possess 
any interest beyond its size. Many nations have 
begged or stolen obelisks from Egypt to decorate, 
with dubious taste, their capitals. Half-a-dozen 
may be found in odd corners in Rome ; London, 
and Paris, and New York have each their trophy ; 
and modern imitations have been raised in 
cemeteries and on battle-fields in memory of those 
whom the affection of friends or the gratitude of 
nations have not thought worth an original design. 
But the obelisk is a monolithic feature in Egyptian 
architecture proportional to and in harmony with 
surrounding buildings, and never placed by itself. 
On the banks of the Potomac, and to the memory 
of the most distinguished American, this gigantic 
obelisk, although embellished with three large 
windows and a patent elevator for country visitors, 
is incongruous and absurd. When the next saviour 
of his country shall have liberated America from 
the tyranny of rings and monopolists, as much 
heavier than that of George III. as were the 
scorpions of Rehoboam compared with the whips 
of his father, a grateful people must logically raise 

C 2 



20 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

a pyramid, greater than that of Cheops, to his 
memory. 

The Metropolitan Opera House at New York 
which has been opened this season, is the latest 
illustration of the American love of big things 
because they are big. This theatre is said to be 
the largest in the world, and was built by wealthy 
New Yorkers who were unable to buy boxes at 
the original Opera House, as their proprietors did 
not think fit to die or vacate as quickly as the 
aspirants made money. The result has been the 
present house, in which may be nightly seen the 
miserable and unmusical millionaires, from Van- 
derbilt, like royalty, in the centre, to Jay Gould in 
the depth of his stage-box, like a financial spider 
waiting to suck the blood of a new victim, feigning 
a pleasure they do not feel, applauding, with 
consistent ignorance, at the wrong time and in the 
wrong place. A similar scene of anguish was 
surveyed by Satan when, in Milton's song, he rose 
from the fiery marl and addressed his peers. The 
new house cannot be compared with those of Paris, 
Vienna, Moscow, and London, which have all 
and each their special charm. Its architect visited 
Europe, and carefully collected for reproduction 
everything that he could find ugly or inconvenient, 
and then built the largest, the meanest, the most 



THE BIG THINGS OF AMERICA. 21 

ill-arranged opera-house, the worst for sight and 
sound, to be found in the world. New York, 
whose opera-going society is hardly a twentieth of 
that of London in the season, cannot support two 
opera-houses ; and on the six or seven occasions 
that I have been in the new house it was half 
empty. But the love of big things has been 
gratified, although the interests of music and the 
public have been sacrificed. 

If a stranger were to ask an intelligent and well- 
informed American what, in his opinion, was the 
thing best worth seeing in the United States, he 
would probably name the pork-packing establish- 
ments at Chicago. To this loathsome favour, like 
Yorick's skull, all must come. The young beauty 
on her honeymoon tour ; the statesman, the 
tourist, all are drawn by some mysterious fasci- 
nation to the shambles. They watch the unfortunate 
swine hurry up the broad way which leads to de- 
struction ; in absorbed horror, they see the throats 
of the victims cut, and the descent of the body, 
living or dead, it matters little, into the boiling 
sea below, the scraping, the disembowelling and all 
the revolting details of the toilette of the dead. 
Few are permitted to escape the spectacle. Lord 
Coleridge, carried to the shambles by his friends of 
the Chicago bar, after having witnessed a few 



22 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

executions, begged to be allowed to retire, as other- 
wise he would be unable to eat sausages again. 
Whether Matthew Arnold saw and reflected on 
the mystery I know not, but we will hope that the 
apostle of culture refused to follow this worse than 
Ashantee custom. When I declined absolutely to 
witness the pig-killing, my Chfcago acquaintances 
were distinctly ruffled. It was hardly to be en- 
dured that a mere tourist, filled with the idle 
sentiment of Europe, should despise the institution 
which had done most to make their city famous. 
But I was firm. I respectfully pointed out that 
among the evil qualities which I had inherited or 
acquired, a love of seeing pigs killed was not in- 
cluded ; that if I were possessed of this unamiable 
monomania I could gratify it in Europe, and that 
I would cheerfully pay fifty dollars to avoid the 
sight. I was reluctantly excused. But I foresee 
that generations of tourists yet unborn will be less 
fortunate ; and the pork-packing establishments of 
Chicago will continue the cynosure of a nation's 
eyes, ranking with the ' Abbey of Westminster, 
the Parthenon of Athens and the Duomo of 
Milan. 

The only sight which, in American eyes, disputes 
the pre-eminence of the Chicago slaughter-yards 
is Niagara, and there may be some who would 



THE BIG THINGS OF AMERICA. 23 

unhesitatingly assign it the palm. Its chief beauty 
consists in its being the largest waterfall in the 
world, with greater capacity than any other for 
producing by water-power those manufactured 
abominations which, as American fabrics or novel- 
ties, are gradually debasing the taste of the civilised 
world. Its one drawback is that the left bank of 
the Niagara river being English territory and the 
main body of the fall being situated therein, Ame- 
ricans are unable to claim a monopoly in this 
natural marvel for the States. It is fortunate for 
posterity that the Canadian English have control 
over the finer portion of the Niagara scenery, as 
this alone protects it from such ruin as vulgarity 
and greed combined can bring on nature. On a 
small island, midway across the American fall, the 
authorities of the State of New York — whose names 
I would hand down to eternal infamy were I not 
convinced that, being New York officials, they are 
already as infamous as it is possible for officials to 
be — have permitted the erection of a paper-mill, 
hideous in its architectural deformity, and blight- 
ing with a curse the beauty of Niagara. It is not 
possible to describe the effect that this building has 
upon a sensitive visitor. The outrage on good 
taste is so extreme, and the state of nervous irrita- 
tion induced by the unconscious vandalism of the 



24 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

American people is so acute, that I am disposed to 
consider a visit to Niagara a source of more pain 
than pleasure. This mill is the outward and visible 
sign, blazoned voluntarily to the world, of American 
Philistinism. The Boston journals may announce 
the advent of the millennium of good taste ; Messrs. 
James and Howells and White may set forth their 
poor platitudes to prove the cultured and refined 
sentiments of their countrymen ; but the Niagara 
paper-mill raises its tall chimney high above the 
everlasting roar of the torrent to give them all 
the lie. 

Nor is this the only outrage on good taste at 
Niagara. The torture of the paper-mill ceases with 
the daylight, and its presence may be forgotten. 
The traveller then, in frantic search for an emotion, 
may hope to wander alone to the edge of the 
avalanche of waters, and there commune with 
such soul as waiters, rival touts, and coachmen 
may have allowed him to retain. In the solemn 
moonlight the wonderful pageant seems more 
weird and mysterious than ever. But what is this 
new and unknown effect of the moonbeams .-* Is 
it — yes, it is — the coloured lime-light, red, green, 
and blue, thrown upon the hoary fleece of Niagara 
by American cockneys ! In sheer disgust and 
exasperation the traveller turns his back on the 



THE BIG THINGS OF AMERICA. 25 

insult and retires sulkily to bed. I remember, some 
years ago, arriving at Naples in the evening with 
two ladies who had never seen Vesuvius, and, as 
the volcano was in eruption, I anticipated great 
pleasure in showing them the glorious spectacle- 
Darkness fell, and the red lines of the molten 
rivers of lava burnt into sight, and the sullen 
clouds above the crater turned to crimson. But 
suddenly a long line of bright points of light 
appeared from the observatory along the crest of 
the mountain. These were lamps of electric light, 
which the Neapolitan municipality, who would 
make a profit out of the Day of Judgment if it 
were possible, had set up to guide visitors along a 
wire tramway to the summit. If I remember 
rightly, the work was afterwards destroyed by the 
lava, and I sincerely trust its promoters and con- 
structors were burnt with it. But the disgust with 
which I saw those electric lights degrading the 
most majestic of nature's phenomena to the level 
of Cremorne or Mabille was repeated in my heart 
as I looked upon the lime-lights at Niagara. 

On the whole, and always excepting the Chicago 
pig-shambles, I am disposed to think Niagara the 
sight best worth seeing in America, though I will 
never return there until the paper-mill shall have 
been removed. I will not attempt to describe the 



26 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

indescribable, and would merely note for the benefit 
of future travellers that the effect of Niagara is as 
follows. On the first day it is distinctly disappoint- 
ing : the roar of the waters is not so loud, the fall 
so high, or the current so fierce as was imagined. 
On the second day this natural though irrational 
disappointment has been gradually and un- 
consciously swallowed up by the waterfall, which 
has become omnipresent, tremendous, and soul- 
absorbing. On the third day Niagara has grown 
a monster so oppressive to soul and sense 
that the visitor hurries from the place with the 
feeling that another day's communing with the 
waters would make him mad. Such, at any rate, 
were my sensations, and I found them almost 
identical with those of my three fellow travellers. 
The last, though by no means the least, 
annoyance connected with Niagara is the 
all-prevading presence of brides. When a young 
American's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of 
love, he vibrates to Niagara as the needle to the 
pole. Here he brings his bride for the honey- 
moon, whether from the facilities offered for 
suicide, or for other and more recondite reasons, 
unconnected with the beauty of the scenery, I know 
not ; though my belief, founded on prolonged 
observation, is that the choice is due to the fact 



THE BIG THINGS OF AMERICA. 27 

that Niagara is the place in the world where two 
persons, who have nothing to say to each other, 
can remain silent without embarrassment for the 
longest period of time, the noise of the water 
forbidding all but pantomimic conversation. How- 
ever this may be, brides and bridegrooms are 
everywhere to be seen, making demonstrative if 
silent love under every tree and on every point 
of danger overhanging the torrent. There are 
perhaps earthly conditions in which the identity 
of a bride may remain concealed, for other women 
besides her are demonstrative in their affection 
and wear new frocks. But Niagara, with its 
almost perpendicular descents to the river, is 
peculiarly favourable to the display of the 
feminine foot and ankle ; and the bride invariably 
wears new boots, which is done by no other sane 
woman on a country excursion. The time to 
visit Niagara is in the early spring or in the late 
autumn, before the arrival, or after the departure, 
of tourists, and when all hotels save one are closed. 
The visitor may then, for a time, be happy, 
especially if he has induced Mr. Patrick Ford," 
the editor of the IrisJi World, to blow up the 
paper-mill with the dynamite collected for his 
scientific war with England. 

In the Mississippi, the Americans may confidently 



28 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

boast of possessing a river larger and longer than 
any to be found elsewhere. The Thames and the 
Tiber, the Danube and the Ganges, though not 
without historical interest or commercial import- 
ance, are p'gmles beside this river giant. Yet, in 
beauty, the Mississippi is not to be compared with 
the clear St. Lawrence, or fifty smaller American 
streams. Indeed its waters are but liquid mud, 
and the scenery, in the lower part of its course, is 
chiefly composed of swamps and sand banks. 
Further to the north its beauty increases, and at 
St. Paul in Minnesota, two thousand miles from 
its mouth, the river flows between cliffs which 
would be imposing w^ere it not that they are 
decorated with the announcement, in letters twenty 
feet high, that " SmitJis chezving tobacco is tJie best!' 
At St. Louis, nearly a thousand miles nearer the 
sea, and after its junction with the Missouri, the 
river has become a superb volume of pea-soup ; 
and thence pursues a thoroughly uninteresting and 
unlovely course to the sea, doing as much mis- 
chief as it can on the way. 

The manner in which Americans permit their 
most beautiful scenery to be spoiled by the 
rapacity of vulgar advertisers, notifying their 
respective swindles on rocks and stones and trees, 
or by the erection of the most commonplace or 



THE BIG THINGS OF AMERICA. 29 

Ugly buildings in most incongruous situations, 
is'' hardly to be explained except on the sup- 
position that the long and absorbed contem- 
plation of the dollar has destroyed any popular 
appreciation of natural beauty. The question 
is one of great psychological interest, and some 
obscurity, for the deepest love of nature and the 
fullest delight in natural beauty fill the works of 
such American poets as Bryant and Longfellow, 
and dignify the obscene ravings of Walt Whitman. 
Yet on what reasonable ground can we account for 
the Niagara paper-mill ? It is not that the love of 
freedom in the States is so keen that the individual 
right of the manufacturer to erect his building over 
the waterfall cannot be safely disputed. The 
whole argument of this book is to show that such 
cannot be the explanation, since individual right 
is not regarded in America when opposed to the 
wishes or prejudices of the majority, or of that 
minority which, by impudence and audacity, 
has usurped the prerogatives of the majority. 
Democracy is everywhere tyranny ; in the same 
sense and only differing in degree from that 
socialistic tyranny which Mr. Herbert Spenser 
has made the text of h's latest warning. If the 
New York people thought the Niagara paper-mill 
the outrage on decency which it is, they would 



30 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

sweep it away without a thought of the individual 
rights which they well know have been acquired by 
bribing the State officials. It would almost seem 
that the sense of beauty was so faint in Americans 
that the desecration of beautiful scenery excited no 
sensation of annoyance in their minds. The 
elevated railway in New York is a striking 
example of this bluntness of aesthetic perception. 
To a stranger this work appears altogether fatal to 
the beauty of the streets. But no one has ever 
heard a New Yorker object to it on aesthetic 
grounds. On the contrary, it is considered a 
chief glory of the city, and a noteworthy sign 
of its marvellous enterprise and activity. One 
memorable event has occurred in modern American 
history which would, at first sight, appear to 
suggest the existence of a popular love of natural 
beauty. This was the Act of Congress in 1872, 
constituting that strange region in the north- 
western part of the territory of Wyoming, which 
is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable and 
beautiful districts in the known w^orld, a public 
park or pleasure-ground for the benefit and enjoy- 
ment of the people. But this action, though de- 
serving of every commendation, is still open to 
criticism. The Yellowstone National Park is 3,575 
square miles in extent, that is to say, the size of 



THE BIG THINGS OF AMERICA. 31 

Kent, Sussex, and Surrey together ; and it is ob- 
vious that as the country becomes populated, and 
Wyoming passes from a wild and uninhabited 
Territory to the higher political rank of an inde- 
pendent State, the Act of Congress will be a dead 
letter. As well attempt to hold Leviathan with a 
hook as to maintain this enormous tract of country 
in savage isolation. Before many years shall have 
passed the paper-maker will have his inevitable 
chimneys over the Mammoth Falls, and the rocks 
of the Grand Canon will invite the traveller to 
invest in Trego's Teabury Tooth Wash or Conger's 
Chest Shields. The whole transaction was a piece 
of swagger which was known to be meaningless. 
Probably no single member of Congress who voted 
for the Bill had ever seen the Yellowstone country. 
Even to this day it is not visited by Americans, 
and, with the exception of the " free-lunchers " 
who were drawn in Mr. Villard's ^ephemeral 
triumph across the continent last autumn, on the 
occasion of the opening of the Northern Pacific 
Railway, I have never met an American who had 
seen the Yellowstone Park. Of twenty tourists 
who have visited it, nineteen are Englishmen ; and 
Americans will tell you that they have a great deal 
too much to do to be fooling around looking after 
beautiful scenery. Saratoga and Newport are quite 



32 THE GRr:AT REPUBLIC. 

distant enough for their hoUday, while the more 
enthusiastic will penetrate to Lakes George and 
Champlain, the White Mountains and the banks of 
the St, Lawrence. In the most beautiful parts of 
the Rocky Mountains, in the finest season of the 
year, I do not remember to have met a single 
American travelling for pleasure and enjoyment 
of the scenery. 

One of the most " elegant resorts " for tourists, in 
the near neighbourhood of New York and Philadel- 
phia, is Delaware Water Gap, where the Delaware 
river forces its way through the Blue Mountains. 
The country is richly wooded and park-like ; cata- 
racts, sylvan glades, bold cliffs, and many-tinted 
foliage make the scene one of enchantinc: and 
every-varying delight. But more remarkable than 
woods or waters is the elaborate system of sign- 
boards which you encounter in every direction. 



To Emily's Rest, i Mile. To Rebecca's Bath, i Mile. 
I^Take the Right-hand Path for CHILDS'S ARBOR. 



Or like this 



Keep to the Left ! I 
Only 5 i6 Mile Further to CPIILDS'S ARBOR, 



THE BIG THINGS OF AMERICA. 33 

The following explanation from a local guide- 
book struck me as so comical that I reproduce 
it here : 

" The place to which your wilHng feet are directed by a 
score of painted clapboards and half a hundred lettered 
shingles is at the brow of the hill, overlooking the river and 
the gap. Through a rift or flume, a tiny stream makes its 
way down in a series of cascades and pools. In among the 
trees, over the running water — which at certain seasons 
hardly more than drips in tear drops, while the wind sighs 
through the melancholy hemlocks — there has been erected, 
at the expense of Mr, G. Washington Childs, A.M., the 
proprietor of the Public Ledger of Philadelphia, a rustic 
structure accurately represented in the following picture."^ 

" This is Childs's Arbour. The most conspicuous feature 
of the exterior is the immense monogram, G. W. C., so 
placed that it can be seen from every point whence the 
arbour itself is visible. For many years this has been the 
favourite place for Mr. Childs's meditations. He finds 
inspiration in the surroundings. 

" In rustic letters, inside the obituary bower, the motto 
of the Childs family is displayed : 



Inveniam Viam aut Faciam. 



"This is in one sense a cryptogram, since it modestly and 
ingeniously conceals the honorary degree conferred upon the 
poet by Princeton College. The key is as follows : 



Inveni-A. M. Vi-A, M, aut Faci-A. M. 
G. Washington Childs-A. M. 



"* Here, in the original, v/as a rough woodcut, representing the bower. 

D 



34 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

"Although there is a booth hard by, where lager beer and 
lemonade are sold to the thirsty wayfarer, nobody ever 
disturbs the poet when he is known to be in his arbour. In 
his absence, however, visitors freely enter the retreat, and 
hundreds of autographs, scrawled and cut upon the graceful 
structure, testify to the reverence with which the great and 
good man is regarded by his fellow citizens." 

Mr. George Washington Childs Is probably the 
only man in Philadelphia who is widely known in 
England. His honour in his own country I did 
not find to be greater than that of most other 
prophets ; but he is doubtless a man of intelligence 
and culture. Yet since Dickens drew the picture 
of Boffin's bower, no more grotesque picture has 
been presented than this Philadelphian editor ad- 
vertising himself in his brand-new "family" motto, 
invented to modestly include his blushing College 
honours ; and writing fifth-rate verse in the 
cockney " arbour," with beer-drinking worshippers 
respectfully gazing upon the poetic frenzy of " the 
great and good man " from the neighbouring booth. 
Is such ridiculous posturing among the sacred 
mysteries of nature compatible with that reverent 
spirit which inspires nature's poet ? Can a people 
have any true perception for the beautiful, or any 
deep sense of the modesty of nature who do not 
overwhelm Mr. Childs and his arbour with 
unextinguishable laughter ! 



CHAPTER III. 

SCENERY AND CITIES. 

I HAVE already said that America is the country 
of disillusion and disappointment, in politics, litera- 
ture, culture, and art; in its scenery, its cities, and 
its people ; and I would here explain the limited 
sense in which this criticism is intended to apply 
to scenery and cities. My remarks can only be 
g-eneral, seeing: that I have no ambition to enter 
into competition with the guide-books, or do 
more than note those superficial characteristics of 
America which cannot fail to attract the at- 
tention of every intelligent traveller. I would 
then observe that to a person who has travelled 
much and has seen the most striking and 
beautiful parts of both Europe and Asia, the 
scenery of the United States and Canada appears 
singularly unattractive and tame. There is some 
fine scenery, but the country is so vast, and 

D 2 



36 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

the distances to be traversed so wearisome, that 
the impression made by the oases of loveHness is 
efficed by the monotony of the general ugHness. 
The prairie has been the favourite theme of poets 
and novehsts : its inimitable extent ; its carpet of 
flowers and its canopy of stars ; its mysterious 
silences ; its terrible awakening- to life in whirl- 
wind and fire. But the prairie of real life is a 
dull, uniform plain, for most part of the year 
burnt a dead brown ; stretching in unbroken 
monotony for hundreds and even thousands of 
miles, precisely like those dismal Russian steppes 
across which, month after month, the poor victims 
of tyranny drag their failing limbs to their 
Siberian grave. 

As the prairies are too large to be beautiful, so 
are the great American lakes, Superior, Michigan, 
and Ontario. They have much of the beauty which 
belongs to the sea ; but on their southern shores 
there is little scenery of interest ; and it is only 
where they narrow to form the St. Lawrence 
river, and for forty miles take the name of the 
Lake of the Thousand Islands, that they are in 
any degree noteworthy. But, although pretty, 
there is nothing in this renowned lake of any 
special beauty, and the same remark applies to 
the famous Lakes George and Champlain, which 



SCENERY AND CITIES. 37 

American guide-books proclaim to be unequalled 
in the world for beauty, but which would not 
receive much attention were they situated in 
the country that owns Maggiore. Como and 
Garda. Such a spectacle as Lucerne on a 
brilliant spring morning, with Pilatus and the 
Righi to right and left, still covered with their 
crown of snow, the deep-blue lake and the multi- 
tudinous mountains in the white distance, is no- 
where to be seen in the States, Of river scenery 
I know little, and the Hudson, the St. Lawrence, 
the Las Animas, Del Norte, and the Mississippi 
exhaust my list. The Hudson has a world-wide 
reputation for beauty, but strikes a European as 
overrated. That portion of its course in the 
immediate neighbourhood of New York is fine, 
and indeed the fifty miles to West Point is well 
worth seeing. After that the scenery is tame, 
and the beauty of the whole distance is much 
injured, more Americano, by ^he railway running 
on either bank, and cutting the river from the 
scenery by its level line of embankment, and by 
the numerous block ice houses and manufactories 
which occupy every specially lovely turn in the 
river. The St. Lawrence is, like the Mississippi 
or the lakes, too large to be uniformly beauti- 
ful, though it is a superb stream, and Quebec, 



38 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

situated at its true mouth, is from natural position 
incomparably the most stately and striking city 
that I have seen in America. Indeed there are 
few cities in Europe which can match Quebec for 
imperial beauty. Much of the best scenery in the 
States is within reasonable distance of the eastern 
sea board, in Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia and 
New Hampshire, where low ranges of picturesque 
mountains and an infinite variety of vegetation 
make in spring and autumn a veritable paradise. 
But, for the boldest and most characteristic scenery, 
it is necessary to go two thousand miles west to the 
Rocky Mountains, where, unless the imagination of 
the traveller has been unduly exalted, he will be 
well repaid for his labours. The first view of the 
Rocky Mountains, before snow has fallen on the 
heights, is disappointing. They do not appear of 
any considerable elevation, though a few of the 
loftiest peaks, such as those behind Colorado 
Springs, are not much inferior to Mont Blanc, This 
is due to the gradual rise of the prairie from the 
Mississippi, until at Cheyenne or Denver the 
traveller, though still on the open plain, is some 
6,000 feet above the level of the sea. Nor is the 
colouring of the mountains at all rich. Almost 
devoid of vegetation on their eastern slopes, and 
not high enough for snow to lie throughout the 



SCENERY AND CITIES. 39 

year, the long range of bare, burnt hill-side rather 
resembles the dreary mountain ranges of Afghan- 
istan or the Derajat than the Alps or the 
Pyrenees. In the spring months, before the 
winter snow has melted or the fierce heats of 
summer have baked the country to a uniform tint, 
the mountains are doubtless beautiful enough. So 
they are as I was privileged to see them, in the 
autumn. One day, early in October, the scene 
changed as if by magic : at night, no snow had 
been visible on the mountains, except in some few 
isolated patches in sheltered valleys, but heavy 
rain fell in the lowlands, and with the morning 
the Rocky Mountains were covered far down with 
snow. The scene then was one of surpassing 
beauty, and the journey from Antonito and 
Duvango to Silverton, the train now slowly 
climbing passes 11,000 feet above the sea, now 
winding along the bank of an impetuous river, 
the whole mountains from river to peak dense!}- 
covered with vegetation aflame with the thousand 
tints with which autumn in America decorates 
the forest, could never be forgotten by any one 
who witnessed it. For the bareness of the 
Rocky Mountains towards the plain country in 
Colorado does not prepare one for the great 
beauty and variety of the forest a\ hen once the 



40 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

heart of the hills has been penetrated. One 
charm of railway travelling in the Rocky Moun- 
tains is due to the manner in which the lines 
have been constructed. In order to avoid un- 
necessary expenditure in this new and wild country, 
which, a few years ago, was almost unexplored, the 
line has been carried along the edge of the pre- 
cipice in a thousand curves, instead of piercing the 
mountains by tunnels as in the St. Gothard Rail- 
way. What is thus lost in directness of route is 
gained in beauty of scenery. No traveller who 
desires to understand what America has of rich, 
quiet beauty, as well as of wild, savage scenery, 
should fail to visit some portions of the interior of 
the Rocky Mountains, and if his business or plea- 
sure carries him to Salt Lake City or San Fran- 
cisco, he would do well to travel by the new route 
through Pueblo and Gunnison, rather than by the 
uninteresting direct line from Cheyenne. 

In speaking of the general impression left upon 
me by American cities, I trust that I shall not be 
accused of Philistinism if I give, unhesitatingly, my 
preference to the brand new city of Chicago, which 
has risen, phoenix like, from its ashes. I am well 
aware that many of the evils which-, I have here- 
after described as existing in the municipal 
administration of New York, flourish almost as 



SCENERY AND CITIES. 41 

luxuriantly in Chicago. But with all its defects, 
upon which I do not intend to dwell, this city 
seems to me destined by its unrivalled position, 
and by the energy and public spirit of its citizens, 
to be the future metropolis of America. It has 
been planned and laid out with a noble confidence 
in its future. Its avenues, and magnificent series 
of parks surrounding the city, are not only un- 
surpassed but unequalled in any part of the world. 
It has had the good fortune to possess architects of 
genius, and many of the private residences are 
models of convenience and good taste, while the 
City Hall and Post Office, for beauty and dignity, 
might well be studied by those architects who arc 
now submitting plans for public offices in London. 
Most American towns are of little interest, and 
their monotony, from the rectangular system on 
which they have been planned, is depressing to 
the last degree. The narrow streets, the winding 
v/ays, the perpetual surprises of unexpected views 
of strangeness and beauty found in the ancient 
cities of Europe, which have slowly grown up 
through a thousand years, with no definite plan, 
and recalling even in their inconveniences the 
struggles and warfare of their mediaeval days, have 
naturally no place in American cities. The width 
of the streets, the admirable public buildings, and 



42 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

the well built and extensive shops and places of 
business, together with the general air of industry 
and prosperity form their only charm, which has no 
connection with the picturesque. Churches, indeed, 
form an exception to the general monotony, and 
to judge from their number, of every denomination, 
the Americans must be, on Sundays, at any rate, 
a religious people ; while there is every sign that 
the Roman Catholic form of creed is gaining, in 
America, all the ground that it has lost in Europe' 
The most noticeable defect of the towns is the 
inferior character of the roadway. Paving in Ame- 
rica seems an unknown art ; the principles of Mac- 
adam have not crossed the ocean, and the paving 
generally would be considered disgraceful in an 
English village. Washington is, in this, as in almost 
every branch of civic administration, the honour- 
able exception, and the reason is found in the fact, 
which is as significant as any in American political 
life, that the district of Columbia, which is virtually 
no more than the city of Washington itself, is not 
delivered, like other American towns, to the tender 
mercies of an inefficient and corrupt municipality. 
1 believe that Washington, in former days, had its 
municipal troubles, and it was only bitter experi- 
ence that induced it to take refuge in despotic 
government from that popular administration which 



SCENERY AND CITIES. 43 

Congress recommends elsewhere, but which it 
soon discarded when the usual results followed 
in the only city over w^hich the Government of 
the United States can exercise any direct control. 
The number of Industrial Exhibitions, both in 
the United States and Canada, surprises a stranger 
who is accustomed to the apathy of the Old World 
at all those times when it is not excited to interna- 
tional competition. Toronto, Chicago, London, St. 
Louis, and even Denver, with many other towns, 
had their exhibitions, all good, and some, especi- 
ally that at Chicago, admirable. In this last was 
the best loan collection of pictures that I saw in 
America. At Denver, the Exhibition buildings 
had been placed too far from the town, and the 
show was not a financial success; but in its display 
of mineral wealth it was of the greatest interest. 
The example of America might be followed in 
England with great advantage to trade. In Lon- 
don something is being done, and the' Fisheries 
Exhibition last year and the Sanitary Exhibition 
this season, together with the international show 
at the Crystal Palace, sufficiently testify to metro- 
pohtan public spirit. But there is no reason that 
the great provincial cities, like Manchester, Liver- 
pool, Glasgow, Bristol, and Birmingham, should not 
annually by turns have an exhibition of arts and 



44 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

industries, which, with due attention to amusement, 
should be profitable. Industrial Exhibitions are 
not the most exciting form of human amusement, 
and it is only as a means for developing commer- 
cial enterprise that they are to be recommended. 
They seem to form a considerable proportion of 
the popular recreation in the United States, and 
their number and excellence are partly due to the 
commercial energy of the people and partly to 
the republican simplicity which, in a country 
possessing little to amuse, has adopted that form 
of dissipation which the jaded cities of the West 
have abandoned from sheer disgust and weariness 
of spirit. There are, however, many circles in the 
inferno of amusement, and it is possible to make 
even an Industrial Exhibition attractive, as was 
proved at Vienna in 1873, and by the Fisheries 
Exhibition in London. 



CHAPTER IV. 

LIBERTY. 

International criticism was represented in 
its most attractive form by Lord Coleridge during 
his recent visit to the States. It is true that he 
was in no position to act the Mentor and unfavour- 
ably discuss American institutions. He was the 
guest of the American bar, and no Englishman in 
recent years has received in the States a more 
cordial or more generous welcome. The high 
rank and reputation of the Chief Justice, his un- 
blemished character, and the literary distinction 
connected with his name, combined with his fine 
presence and courtly manners, impressed and 
charmed American society. His progress from 
city to city was almost triumphal, and his opinion 
of his hosts and their country as expressed in hia 
speeches was doubtless heartfelt and sincere. 
Guests and hosts were mutually gratified. It may, 
however, be questioned whether it was altogether 



46 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. - 

consistent with the dignity of the Chief Justice of 
England to be carried about America hke Barnum's 
" Greatest Show on Earth," as an advertisement 
of the glory of that remarkable country. Better 
the dinner of herbs with freedom, than terrapin 
and canvas-back ducks with servitude. And it 
must be admitted that a full expression of opinion 
and indulgence of the critical or judicial spirit 
were impossible in these frequent banquets and 
receptions. It is not after dining with a friend 
that we can best criticise the arrangement of his 
house or the manners of his family. It is true 
that honest criticism was neither expected nor 
desired, for the Americans resemble — and herein 
they are very sensible people — those authors de- 
scribed by Oliver W. Holmes, who, when they ask 
for your criticism expect your praise, and will not 
be satisfied with anything else. A Chief Justice 
should only speak from the bench, where his 
words carry the force and weight which is rightly 
accorded to deliberate judgment, wisely formed 
and temperately expressed. Not for him is the 
glorious dust of the arena or the applause of the 
crowd ; the falseness of open compliment, the 
insincerity of unspoken blame. His language 
should be judicial, or he should be silent. Now, 
whatever may have been the merits or charm of 



LIBERTY. 47 

Lord Coleridge's American utterances, no one 
will be disposed to call them judicial. His praise 
of many things American may be fairly held 
extravagant ; his eulogy of Matthew Arnold is 
open to the same objection ; while, if the American 
press be correct, he even attempted socially to 
whitewash General Butler, Governor of Massa- 
chusetts, the most unscrupulous and indecent of 
demagogues, whose defeat during the late elections 
has delighted all honest men, whether Republicans 
or Democrats. His ungrudging praise of the 
judiciary of the United States altogether ignored 
the fact that a considerable proportion of that 
body, elected by the same processes as give 
municipal government to the cities, is notoriously 
inefficient and corrupt, and that the criminal 
classes, who are personally most interested in the 
verdicts of the courts, select the judges to preside 
in them. Even in lighter matters Lord Coleridge's 
desire to please went somewhat in excess of the 
requirements of the situation. His comparison of 
English and American beauty, which occasioned 
much comment in the States, cannot be considered 
just to his own countrywomen. The Washington 
Post says : — 

" But his expressions regarding the American ladies have 
imperilled the Lord Chief Justice's chances of ever again 



48 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

finding favour in the eyes of English beauty. An absence of 
only two months from his native land has served, he says, to 
win him from the standard of English loveliness, and he can 
conscientiously champion only the American type of beauty. 
Wherever he went the American lady was the same charming 
personage, and the American girl the same self-possessed 
bundle of independent anomalies. He could not sufficiently 
praise the fresh complexions, the charming manners, and the 
independence that marked the ladies he counted himself for- 
tunate in meeting. And fairly turning against his own 
countrywomen, he unhesitatingly admitted that in his eyes 
the American women were the more attractive." 

A correspondent of the New York Woi'ld, 
who claimed to have interviewed Lord Coleridge 
on the steamer which took him to England, 
writes : — 

"He said he thought the American women far excelled 
their English cousins in both beauty and intellect, and he 
should not be backward to say so on his native soil." 

Although justice be proverbially blind, and the 
ethics of compliment are elastic, there is no occa- 
sion to believe that Lord Coleridge ever made the 
remarks attributed to him in so crude a form ; 
and American reporters are very apt to record the 
questions they may ask as being the answers they 
h^ve received. But the comparison, whether made 
by Lord Coleridge in these terms or not, is one 
of some interest, and a few remarks on it will not 
be out of place. There can be no doubt that 



LIBERTY. 49 

Americans honestly believe their women to be the 
most beautiful in the world ; nor to them would 
there appear any extravagance in the remark of 
the Nezv York Suit on the audience which attended 
Irving's first performance, " in respect of the beauty 
it contained far surpassing any audience that Mr. 
Irving ever bowed to in his life." But the opinion 
of foreigners — T do not speak of Englishmen alone 
— is very different ; and I have never met one who 
had lived long or travelled much in America who 
did not hold that female beauty in the States is 
extremely rare, while the average of ordinary good 
looks is unusually low. More pretty faces are to be 
seen in a single day in London than in a month in 
the States. The average of beauty is far higher in 
Canada, and the American town in which most 
pretty women are noticeable is Detroit, on the 
Canadian border, and containing many Canadian 
residents. In the Western States beauty is con- 
spicuous by its absence, and in the Eastern towns, 
Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, 
it is to be chiefly found. In New York, in August, 
I hardly saw a face which could be called pretty. 
Society was out of town, but an estimate of 
national beauty is best formed by a study of the 
faces of the people ; and the races at Monmouth 
Park had collected whatever of beauty or fashion 

E 



so THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

had been left in the city. Even at Saratoga, the 
most attractive face seemed that of a young 
Engh'sh lady passing through on her way to 
Australia. In November, New York presented a 
different appearance, and many pretty women were 
to be seen, although the number was comparatively 
small, and, at the Metropolitan Opera House, even 
American friends were unable to point out any 
lady whom they could call beautiful. A dis- 
tinguished artist told me that wiien he first visited 
America he scarcely saw in the streets of New 
York a single face which he could select as a 
model, though he could find twenty such in the 
London street in which his studio was situated. 
The American type of beauty is extremely deli- 
cate and refined, and London and Continental 
society will always contain some American ladies 
who may rank among the loveliest in the world. 
Such are known to us all, but are more common 
in Europe than America. A beautiful girl is, in 
the first place, more likely to travel than a plain 
one, for she is anxious for new worlds to conquer; 
the pride and affection of her parents are more 
likely to second her legitimate ambition, and, 
having reached Europe, she is obviously more 
likely to remain there. If American girls be 
anxious to marry Englishmen, as a study of 



LIBERTY. 51 

contemporary novels, plays, and society would 
seem to show, it is a proof of their good sense ; 
for America, which is the best place in the world 
for making money, is the very worst for spending 
it. Life revolves round the office and the shop 
and the counting-house, and a woman of spirit 
doubtless prefers a society like that of London, 
where even the men, to say nothing of the women, 
from the time they rise at eleven till they go to bed 
at three o'clock in the morning, think of nothing 
but how they may amuse themselves. America 
will grov/ day by day more like the Old World 
in this respect, and when its citizens shall have 
learned the science of amusement it will become 
a far more agreeable place than it is at present. 
The change in the habits of the men will have a 
direct effect upon the beauty of the women. The 
English are an athletic race, and the amusements 
in which they delight are in the open air. As are 
the men so are the women. Riding and rowing, 
walking and tennis, have developed in them a 
beauty the chief charm of which is that it is 
healthy. The late hours of the ball-room do not 
take the bloom from a cheek which is daily re- 
newed by a gallop in the park before luncheon 
or a game of lawn-tennis in the afternoon. In 
America life is sedentary. The national game of 

E 2 



52 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

base-ball is mostly played by professionals ; the 
national pastime of trotting-matches cannot be 
counted as exercise in the English sense of the 
word. The men, with few exceptions, have no 
country life — few of them even know how to ride ; 
they neither hunt nor row, nor shoot, nor play 
cricket ; and the women, being everywhere the 
shadow of the men, are accomplished in none of 
those outdoor exercises in which their English 
sisters find and renew their beauty. The charm 
which is born of delicacy may be a very lovely 
thing, like the finest porcelain, but it does not 
constitute the highest form of beauty, which is 
inseparable from good health. 

The foregoing remarks, which were intended in 
all courtesy, excited, on their first publication, 
much angry criticism in America. Denunciation 
of political profligacy was not only expected, but 
could not equal in acrimony that which daily ap- 
peared in every American newspaper. But it was 
an unpardonable offence to challenge the superi- 
ority in beauty of the American women over 
the rest of the feminine world. One or two 
extracts may be taken almost at random from 
American journals. TJie Nezu Orleans Times 
Democrat writes as follows : — 



LIBERTY. 53 

" His denial of the beauty of American women does not 
call for any special mention. That is a matter of taste, and 
an opinion is valuable in proportion to the quahfications of 
the judge. Sir Lepel may prefer the large and ample style of 
his countr}^women to the more delicate types of this country. 
It is his privilege to do so, and its exercise may possess for 
him the additional attraction of placing him in antagonism 
to nearly every foreigner of taste who has visited the country. 
No doubt the arrangement is gratifying to so thorough a 
Britisher as Sir Lepel Griffin appears to be. It is quite 
evident that he would be shocked and grieved to find himself 
forced into agreeing with the rest of the world. We can 
afford to dismiss this topic without making an effort to dis- 
lodge any of our critic's convictions. His proposition that 
American women are unhealthy and that the average English- 
woman is a model of grace and beauty is simply amusing 
and nothing more. He is welcome to his preference, and, as he 
declares his horror of dwelling anywhere save in England, we 
are rather disposed to congratulate him on his philosophy." 

A Chicago newspaper writes : — 

" The pertinence of what Sir Lepel has to offer upon this 
delicate subject depends entirely upon his standard of beauty, 
and these standards always vary in different localities. The 
Central Africans regard the Caucasian pink and white as some- 
thing hideous. The ebony hue is to them the colour of beauty. 
The thick lips, the sprawling noses, and the kinky hair ex- 
press to them the highest type of loveliness. In like manner 
the Mongol luxuriates in the saffron hue and almond eyes, 
the long finger-talons and pinched feet as the traits which go 
to make up the symbolic Venus. The Digger Indian regards 
the squalid, splay-footed, disgusting belle of his tribe as a 
thing of sweetness and fight. What are Sir Lepel's standards ? 
Probably the English women. We hope it is not ungallant 
to say that if they are no one will be surprised to learn that 
he does not think American women are handsome. Measured 
by English standards they certainly are not. Fortunately we 



54 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

have had opportunities of applying the tests. They sent us 
their most lovely lady — widely advertised as the professional 
beauty of England — sent her over here making no pretensions 
that she was an actress, but claiming for her that she was 
lovely beyond all description or comparison. Her charms 
had distracted all England and had been praised by all 
the connoisseurs and esthetes from the Prince of Wales to 
Oscar Wilde. 

" The 'Jersey Lily ' came, and it was soon found that she 
could not compare in beauty with scores of American ladies 
in every city where she was on exhibition. Her charms 
smote one of our countrymen to a considerable extent and at 
considerable expense, if reports be true, but the rest of the 
population escaped unscathed. Having had the typical 
English beauty on iinspection, we can speak with some 
confidence in the matter. '- 

Criticism of this character would seem wanting 
in precision if it be remembered that nowhere in 
her own country is a beautiful American woman 
more admired than in English society. The 
history of successive London seasons proves 
this ; and the passion of the English for novelty, 
which has been noticed by every foreign observer 
from the time of Froissart, inclines them rather 
to exaggerate than depreciate the attractions of a 
fair stranger. All can remember American ladies 
who have been accepted as beauties in London 
drawing-rooms where far lovelier English w^omen 
have remained unnoticed. It is improbable that 
any civilised or cultured person, whose eye, or 
ear, or mind has been trained in accordance with 



LIBERTY. 



55 



the acknowledged rules of art and taste, would be 
influenced in his estimate of beauty by national 
predilections. Does the Englishman prefer the 
daubs which cover so large a space on the walls 
of the Royal Academy to the glories of the Pitti or 
the Vatican ? Does the cultured American prefer 
the thin milk and water of Mr. W. D. Howells 
to the strong wine of Thackeray or George Eliot ; 
or ignore the winning grace of Ellen Terry for 
the pastoral friskings of Minnie Palmer.? I think 
not : and Englishmen are ready enough to allow 
that in some parts of Italy, in Greece, and on 
the northern shores of Asia Minor the average of 
female beauty is far higher than in his native 
land. National vanity, where inordinately de- 
veloped, may take the form of asserting that 
black is white, as in France, where the average 
of good looks, among both men and women, is 
perhaps lower than elsewhere in Europe. If a 
pretty woman be seen in the streets of Paris she 
is almost certainly English or American : yet if 
a foreigner were to form an estimate of French 
beauty fi'om the rapturous descriptions of con- 
temporary French novels, or from the sketches 
of La Vie Parisieiuie, he must conclude that 
the Frenchwoman was the purest and loveliest 
type in the world, in face and figure. The 



56 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

fiction in this case disguises itself in no semblance 
of the truth. 

I have freely admitted the American type of 
beauty to be extremely delicate and refined, and, 
although I maintain my position that there are 
more pretty women to be met in London in a day 
than in the States in a month, yet the comparison 
thus made is hardly fair to America, seeing that 
London naturally absorbs all that is best and 
brightest in English men or women ; and there are 
many parts of England where beauty, among the 
lower classes, is as rare as in America. Moreover, 
the ranks of London beauty are swelled each 
season by a large and distinguished American 
contingent. 

Many of my critics have disputed the statement 
that American women are delicate and physically 
undeveloped ; but denial does not affect those 
notorious facts which the physicians of the States 
themselves endorse. But on this subject I would 
neither wish nor presume to speak, though, in justi- 
fication of my former statement, I will venture to 
quote the words of a few American authorities 
whose unprejudiced opinion would seem convinc- 
ing. To them I will only add the expression of a 
hope, which all friends of America will share, that 
a more healthy and robust physical training of 



LIBERTY. 57 

children and a growing love of exercise and field 
sports, may restore the race to the vigour of its 
original stock, and avert the now threatened danger 
of physical decadence. 

Dr. S. Weir Mitchell writes :— 

" To-day the American woman is, to speak plainly, physi- 
cally unfit for her duties as woman, and is, perhaps, of all 
civilized females the least qualified to undertake those weightier 
tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system of man. She 
is not fairly up to what nature asks from her as wife and 
mother. If the mothers of a people are sickly and weak, 
the sad inheritance falls upon their offspring, and this is why 
I must deal first, however briefly, with the health of our girls, 
because it is here, as the doctor well knows, that the trouble 
begins. Ask any physician of your acquaintance to sum up 
thoughtfully the young girls he knows, and to tell you how 
many in each score are fit to be healthy wives and mothers, 
or, in fact, to be wives and mothers at all. I have been asked 
this question myself very often, and I have heard it asked of 
others. The answer I am not going to give, because I should 
not be believed — a disagreeable position in which I shall not 
deliberately place myself. Perhaps I ought to add that the 
replies I have heard given by others were appalling." 

Later he continues : — 

" Now I ask you to note carefully the expression and figures 
of the young girls whom you may chance to meet in your 
walks, or whom you may observe at a concert or in a ball- 
room. You will see many very charming faces, the like of 
which the world cannot match — figures somewhat too spare of 
flesh, and, especially south of Rhode Island, a marvellous little- 
ness of hand and foot. But look further, and especially among 
New England young girls ; you will be struck with a certain 



58 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

hardness of line in form and feature, which should not be seen 
between thirteen and eighteen at least. And if you have an 
eye which rejoices in the tints of health, you will miss them 
on a multitude of the cheeks which we are now so daringly 
criticising. I do not want to do more than is needed of this 
ungracious talk ; suffice it to say that multitudes of our young 
girls are merely pretty to look at, or not that ; that their 
destiny is the shawl and the sofa, neuralgia, weak backs, and 
the zmried forms of hyste7'ia, that domestic demon which has 
produced untold discomfort in many a household, and, I am 
almost ready to say, as much unhappiness as the husband's 
dram." 

Dr. Allen, of Rhode Island, speaking of the 
strictly native New Englanders, says : — 

" The women have deteriorated physically in a surprising 
degree. A majority of them have a predominance of nerve 
tissue, with weak muscles and digestive organs." 

The New York Sim, in commenting on this 
statement of Dr. Allen, says further of the New 
Englanders who have remained at home : — 

"Their families are small. They are not physically as 
vigorous as their fathers. The ivomen at-e not symmetrically 
developed, and their nervous orga/iisatio/i is apt to be 
morbid.''' 

The statements of the Rev. S. W. Dike : — 

" The diminishing size of the New England family of so- 
called native stock is well known. The reported number of 
children of school age in Vermont and New Hampshire is 
scarcely three-fourths as large as it was thirty years ago." 



LIBERTY. 59 

The following is the opinion of Mr. William 

Blaikle: — 

" The results of this utter neglect of any sound system of physi- 
cal education stand out in almost every city home in America. 
Scarcely one girl in three ventures to wear a jersey, mainly 
because she knows too well that this tell-tale jacket only be- 
comes a good figure. Yet the difference in girth between the 
developed arm which graces a jersey and the undeveloped 
one which does not, in a girl of the same height and age, is 
seldom more than two inches, and often even than one, while 
the well-set chest outgirths the indifferent one by seldom over 
three inches. Among girls, running is a lost art. Yet it is 
doubtful if an exercise was ever devised which does more to 
beget grace and ease of movement. There are probably not 
ten girls in any class of fifty in one of our public schools who 
could run a mile, even if they got a dollar a foot for it. Or 
twenty boys out of any fifty either." 

Later, in his clever article on " Our Children's 
Bodies," the same writer compares the physically 
robust Canadians with his delicate country- 
women : — 

" In what contrast with this make-believe walking and the 
wofully defective physical culture and condition of many of 
our city girls is the story told in the following despatch from 
the Montreal Carnival last winter : 

" ' Next came skating races, which were only second, in 
drawing spectators, to the trotting. As is universally known, 
Montrealers are like ducks, who take to the water when born. 
They assume skating frolics when escaping from the cradle. 
It is Hterally true that they are skating almost before they are 
able to walk. The fascination in the exercise, which seems 
to be hereditary, increases as they grow up, and when they 
have arrived at manhood orwomanhood— >r //?^ girls are even 



6o THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

more expert than the men — tJiey can rival the world for grace 
and agility as runners. Proof of this last assertion was seen 
by thousands on the river this afternoon. The contests were 
in some cases more tightly fought out than by the trotting 
equines.' 

" What a ring and tingle and glow of ruddy health there 
is about all this ! We wonder if those girls know what a 
headache is, or a side-ache ? Or if ' the shawl, the sofa, and 

neuralgia ' are likely soon to be their destiny ? 

How would, not the weakest and most inert, nor yet the fleetest 
and most enduring girl, but she who fairly represents the 
average girl in one of our school classes, have fared in that 
inspiring struggle that bright winter afternoon on the gleaming 
broad St. Lawrence ? Would she have been in it at all, much 
less anywhere near the front rank, at the end of half a mile, 
or even of a quarter ? Ask her brother, and he will tell you 
plainly — whatever different and more flattering version some 
other girl's brother may make of it." 

When we read of these performances of the 
Canadian girls, and, further, of the lady who has 
been accepted in the States as the representative of 
English beauty, astonishing the Americans by a 
thirty-mile walk without fatigue, we can under- 
stand the belief held by Englishmen that delicacy 
directly detracts from beauty, which is inseparable 
from good health. 

In reply to the statement that the English stan- 
dard of beauty is incorrect, it may be suggested 
that it is in strict accord with the most ancient 
examples and the generally accepted canons of 
art, and that a study of classical models will show 



LIBERTY. 6i 

that Greece and Rome, in their worthiest days, 
acknowledged no beauty which did not include full 
physical development. The lithe and willowy 
figure, the praises of which are sounded by 
American writers, and the grace of which has 
an undoubted charm, too often represents mere 
physical degeneracy. 

Nothing is more pleasant in America, or places 
the civilisation of the country in a brighter or more 
honourable light, than the universal respect publicly 
paid to women by men of all degrees. That there 
is in this something of exaggeration, and that some 
women abuse their exceptional privileges, demand- 
ing discourteously what men are ready voluntarily 
to offer, does not materially affect the question. 
An American gentleman who resigns his seat to a 
lady in a steamboat or tram-car, or who wearies 
himself in looking after her luggage and wrestling 
on her account with railway porters, does not ask 
even the thanks which politeness should be eager 
to proffer. His action has been disinterested, 
instinctive, and to satisfy his own sense of pro- 
priety. The difference, in this respect, between the 
French and American Republics is curious indeed. 
A P>enchman will ruthlessly turn a lady into the 
mud of the street rather than step off the pave- 
ment himself; or will bribe the railway guard to 



62 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

induce delicate women to leave their pre-engaged 
carriage in order that he may not sit with his back 
to the engine. He will hardly assist a woman in 
distress unless she be attractive. The French, 
below the thinnest veneer, are the most impolite of 
civilised races, Americans, on the other hand, 
though without superficial polish, are warm-hearted 
and chivalrous in the highest degree. The position 
in which they have placed their women is the best 
guarantee that the nation will outgrow the blemishes 
which now disfigure it, and will, in the future, attain 
a higher civilisation than has been enjoyed by any 
people who have regarded their intellectual and 
political life as the undivided dominion of man. 

But the emancipation of women is not without 
its dangers and inconveniences. Between woman 
and man there can be no true equality, for there are 
no common terms to express what is essentially 
different ; and, if the woman allow her social and 
domestic position to be undermined, her victories 
in other fields will avail her little. And of this 
there are some ominous signs in America. Within 
the last thirty years, divorces in the States have 
doubled proportionally to population and the 
number of marriages. Being granted for trifling 
reasons, such as incompatibility of temper, and 
the law governing them being different in the 



LIBERTY. 63 

several States ; while the confusion is increased by 
a vast immigration of strange nationalities, 
wandering hither and thither in search of a 
favourable settlement, it can be no cause for 
surprise if the fixity of marriage be shaken and the 
conception of the family as the social unit becomes 
weakened in favour of the individual. But this 
result, so far as social evolution is concerned, is 
strictly retrogressive. The feeling against Mor- 
monism is, in the States, exceedingly strong ; and 
polygamy is, beyond dispute, a condition un- 
favourable and indeed fatal to a high civilisation, 
although the community of Salt Lake City must 
be allowed to be prosperous and well ordered. But 
a too facile divorce law differs from polygamy in 
little but name, and some American writer has said 
that the man who has three or four wives divorced, 
one after another, only drives his team tandem, 
while the Mormon elder has it four in hand. The 
proportion of divorces to marriages is in som.e 
States startling enough. In San Francisco city 
there was a divorce to every five marriages in 
1881 : in Maine, there were 507 divorces in 1880, 
or nearly one to nine marriages. The frequency of 
the suits results in the utmost carelessness of the 
courts ; in one State the average duration of such 
cases is fifteen minutes. At Chicac^o, according to 



64 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

Mr. Henry Ward Beecher, the boys on the train call 
*' Chicago, thirty minutes for divorce," and though 
I cannot say that I have myself heard them, the 
incident is not more surprising than was the touting 
for clients of rival parsons of the Fleet, in the 
London of the last century. Collusion becomes a 
matter of course ; the tie which can be so easily 
snapped is inconsiderately formed ; while the 
frequent difference in the law renders it difficult to 
know whether the marriage or divorce of one State 
is valid in another, and induces many foreign 
immigrants to abandon their families and marry 
elsewhere. The evil of the present state of things 
is so great and acknowledged that ere long 
Congress will be compelled to intervene and pass a 
uniform law for the whole United States. England 
may take a lesson from America in this particular, 
that, so far as divorce is concerned, the sexes are 
equal before the law. Here, where the subjection 
of women has so long formed a discreditable chapter 
in the statute book, from which a higher liberalism 
and a more chivalrous generosity have not yet 
completely banished it, the relief which men can 
demand is refused to the weaker sex which needs 
it the most. Equal justice will not, it may be 
hoped, be much longer denied ; while divorce will 
be granted for cruelty, habitual intemperance, 



LIBERTY. 65 

or on conviction of any heinous or disgraceful 
crime. 

The idea which underlies the institution of 
marriage has materially differed in England and 
America, whose first chivalrous settlers abandoned 
all they held most dear in order to avoid the 
heavy burthen which sacerdotalism, ever allied 
with tyranny, had placed upon them. They re- 
jected marriage as a sacrament, and regarded it 
as a civil contract, the moral obligation and per- 
manency of which would have till now remained 
undisputed had not the flood of immigration and 
the rapid development of the country formed a 
solution so strong as to partially dissolve social 
institutions, as it has those political methods which 
were sufficient for the original community. In 
England, on the contrary, the idea of marriage 
as a sacrament has survived its exclusion, as such, 
from the Anglican ritual ; and its acceptance as 
a civic contract alone, secure, like other solemn 
engagements of a formal character, under an 
impartially administered law, is only gradually 
taking the place of the former sentiment. The 
conservatism of the country is ever too strong for 
the speedy triumph of any liberal principle ; and 
sacerdotalism, as distinct from religion, is still an 
imposing force. It must not be imagined that 

F 



66 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

the priestly caste, of any denomination, is more 
liberal or charitable in America than elsewhere. 
The trail of the serpent is over them all. Cotton 
Mather and his Puritan fathers preached as savage 
a gospel as the Spanish Inquisition, and his de- 
scendants are worthy of him. Last October a 
Congregational minister named Newman was 
preaching in New York on ^' Christianity tri- 
umphant in the elevation of Woman." The 
representative of Independence and Dissent fur- 
nished and produced all those old weapons of 
sophistry which English ecclesiasticism is being 
forced to abandon. He pronounced for the sacra- 
mental character of marriage, and ridiculed the 
civil ceremony. Here he was assisted by the fact 
that, besides the denominational ministers, the 
New York aldermen were empowered to perform 
it. "Imagine," he said, "a New York alderman 
performing such a ceremony. A New York alder- 
man with a shillelah on his shoulder, brogues on 
his feet, and potatoes in his pocket. A walking 
grog shop, reeking of gin. Surely such a marriage 
performed by such a one is scarcely worth 
seventy-five cents." The roars of laughter which 
greeted this description sounded oddly in a 
religious building. The apostle of hatred then 
proceeded to denounce the Mormons, who, he 



LIBERTY. 67 

said, defied the laws of the United States, and 
urged that the heresy which had grown up in 
the West should be forcibly trampled out. It 
would have been more to the purpose had he 
denounced the practical polygamy and polyandry 
which result from the present condition of the 
marriage law. 

It cannot be denied that the position of women 
in the United States is far more favourable and 
just than in England, where their most elementary 
rights have been only lately conceded in the 
Married Woman's Property Bill. Their equitable 
claim to such work as they may choose and can 
efficiently perform is not disputed, and the un- 
manly riots in Kidderminster to prevent the 
employment of women in the curtain and carpet 
manufactories would hardly be possible in 
America. For them an elaborate system of 
higher education, technical and industrial, has 
been framed ; and, three years ago, there were 
no less than 227 high-class institutions, besides 
colleges and universities, in which women could 
study as completely as men, chemistry, geology, 
botany, physics, mathematics and all such applied 
sciences as might be useful to them in private or 
professional life. Most of these institutions are 

F 2 



68 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

the growth of the last twelve years ; and, as 
England has made a good start in this most 
honourable contest it may fairly be hoped that 
she will not permit America to leave her behind. 

Whether the emancipation of women has not 
proceeded too far in the case of unmarried girls 
is a question which those who are acquainted with 
American society can best decide. I confess a 
preference for the English system, which, midway 
between the complete and jealous seclusion of 
France and the independence of America, allows 
the young girl as much liberty as experience has 
shown can be safely intrusted to her. American 
novelists have described their young country- 
woman as formed of different clay to the rest 
of the world, and so strong, self-reliant, and 
superior to the infirmities and weakness of 
humanity as to be able to defy the dangers 
which may threaten her from without or from 
her ow^n heart. But the American girl is still 
one of Eve's family, and as susceptible as any 
of her European sisters. The process known in 
England as "keeping company," and confined to 
the humbler ranks of life, is an institution of 
American society ; and an unmarried girl can 
receive her admirers without reference to her 



LIBERTY. 69 

parents ; and drive or go to the opera or theatre 
with the special object of her attention. Marriage 
is the original object of this as of all customs, 
civilised or savage, which bring the youth of both 
sexes together ; but pleasure rather than marriage 
is the modern development of the idea. A young 
debutante in New York or Boston, in her first 
season, when her attractions are the brightest and 
her chances of marriage are naturally the best, 
is adopted by one of the professional male flirts, 
who may be a gentleman of good position and 
whose attentions flatter the vanity of the in- 
experienced girl. He is her constant attendant at 
balls and picnics, in public and private. He may 
not have the remotest intention of marrying, yet 
drives out of the field the aspirants who would 
propose. These intimate relations, which would 
not be tolerated for a day in England unless the 
parties were engaged, may continue the whole 
season, or for two; or may be repeated with 
another or half-a-dozen newer admirers. If this 
system be liked by American men, there is no 
reason that any one else should object to it. But 
that it must tend to rub the bloom off the peach, 
and lessen the delicacy and freshness of a girl's 
sentiments is obvious to all who know anything 



^o THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

of the world or the human heart. Men, unambitious 
in their social aspirations, would prefer a wife from 
a New England farm-house to a New York beauty 
who had been ostentatiously protected through a 
whole season by a Fifth Avenue exquisite. 



CHAPTER V. 

EQUALITY. 

The doctrine of equality, essentially illogical 
though it may be, has, in America, been carried 
into practical effect so far as the conditions of 
social and political hfe will allow ; and in no other 
country can its results be more clearly seen or 
more accurately tested. There can be no study 
more interesting than the strange and wide di- 
vergence in the application of the doctrine in the 
two great Republics of to-day, France and America. 
In the former we are accustomed to the emblazon- 
ment on every public building of the republican 
profession of faith, Liberti\ Egalitc, Fraternite ; but 
what is the interpretation of the legend ? Liberty, 
as reflected in contemporary French literature, is 
the apotheosis of animalism, of which Zola's latest 
novel is the most loathsome witness ; equality 
signifies the internecine warfare of class against 
class ; while fraternity is hardly more than a 



72 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

deeper contempt and a keener hatred of every- 
thing not French. The RepubHc has given to 
France h'ttle beyond a perpetual change of street 
nomenclature, and a more greedy class of officials ; 
it has not deeply influenced the life of the people, 
and may be thrown aside to-morrow like a coat 
which has outlived the fashion. A theatrical air, 
suggestive of the footlights, attends it, and thus 
it has failed to attract the sympathy of America, 
whose sturdy and ingrained Republicanism de- 
spises the democratic tinsel and limelight. There 
was a time when Paris was the veritable paradise, 
not of women alone, but of the whole American 
race; when the pinchbeck glories of a brand 
new court, whose welcome of parvenus was 
naturally sympathetic, fluttered the gentle breasts 
of the Yankee matrons and maidens, whose ideas 
of society had been formed in the quiet of New 
England villages, or amid the bustle of Saratoga 
caravansaries. But with the fall of the Empire 
the love of Americans for Paris grew cold, and it 
is amusing to hear them' describe the ruin which 
republican institutions have wrought in their 
latest paradise, after the same fashion as Satan is 
held to have made the first uninhabitable. They no 
longer see Paris clothed in the old imperial 
glamour, but as it really is — a commonplace, stucco 



EQUALITY. 73 

wilderness, as dull and sordid as their own New 
York ; where the theatres are crowded dens sacred 
to asphyxia, and the opera house a stupendous 
imposture, where gilding usurps the place of art : 
a city where the only sentiment ennobling the 
population is expressed in the daily effort to make 
as much out of the foreigner as possible, with the 
least expenditure of money or politeness. 

Equality is understood in America in a very 
different sense. Not there, as in France, the ex- 
pression of a passing caprice, it is the monomania 
of an entire nation. An ideal impossible of 
attainment, contradicted in daily practice by the 
exclusive society of New England and the South, 
as by the millionaires whose monopolies are its 
very negation, it yet influences the life of the 
people in every particular, much as the belief that 
he could fly governed every movement of a lunatic 
I once saw in an asylum. The struggle after 
equality has determined most of the social insti- 
tutions of the States : domestic service, houses, 
hotels, cuisine, travelling and education. It has 
dominated their politics and has perhaps determined 
their religion. It has withdrawn much of the 
sweetness and light from their social life, and has 
left literature and art as monotonous a wilderness 
as their own prairies. 



74 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

The first relation affected by the worship of 
equality, and one which underlies every social 
condition in the United States, is that of master 
and servant. This, in its patriarchal or modern 
English sense, can hardly be said to exist in 
America. If, by law and in popular belief, one 
man be the equal of another, it necessarily follows 
that the position of the servant, or help, to the 
citizen who pays him for certain specified service 
is essentially different from that which he holds in 
countries where tradition and prescription have 
attached to menial service other conditions than 
the bare performance of particular duties. The 
first and the most important of these is the out- 
ward observance of unvarying respect to the 
master. This habit of deference, which would be 
termed servile in America, has in it no necessary 
element of servility. The relations between a 
well-bred Englishman and his servants are cordial 
and mutually respectful ; with them he is not 
familiar, but neither is he arrogant or unreasonable. 
The prescription of a thousand years has decided 
that they move on different though parallel lines ; 
they do not approach, but neither do they collide. 
Here, the divisions between the different classes 
are almost as complete as those which separate the 
castes of India — those immemorial barriers against 



EQUALITY. 75 

change which only those would remove who do 
not understand that they insure the stability of our 
Eastern Empire. When in England a successful 
tradesman gives up business and buys an estate in 
the country he breaks altogether from his former 
moorings. He will not be received with open 
arms by the county families, and if they do not 
return his calls, his isolation is complete. But the 
neglect of the exclusive caste does not affect the 
behaviour of the menial class towards him ; and 
his footmen are as obsequious and dignified as 
those of his aristocratic neighbours. However 
much Boston or Virginia may proclaim their high 
descent — pretensions which seem somewhat out of 
place in a Republic — or however contemptuously 
the exclusive clubs of New York may regard the 
enriched parvenu, there are no recognised castes in 
America. Mr. Macgillicuddy, the ex-grocer, with 
his house in Fifth Avenue and his wife and 
daughters brilliant with diamonds, has changed 
position but little from the time when he bullied 
his shop boys in Broadway. Indeed his personal 
interest in the shop continues ; for were he to be idle 
he would find no one to keep him company, and 
would probably die of enmii. And as there is no 
caste of masters, so is there none of service. The 
advantage of the feudal tradition which prevails in 



76 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

England is, that domestic service being held in no 
dishonour, and implying no loss of self-respect, it 
has grown into a science to be perfectly acquired 
by patience and study alone. The exclusiveness 
and fastidiousness of a cultivated and wealthy 
class have produced the perfection of domestic 
service, performed with the least possible friction, 
by persons as accomplished in their menial but 
still honourable duties as the masters in their 
several occupations. In America there is nothing 
of this, and the absence of quiet and respectful 
service is to an Englishman an ever-recurring 
source of annoyance. No one can deny that the 
American ideal is a noble one, and worthy a great 
and free people. Every political dogma which 
encourages the true man to rise above the evil 
surroundings of his birth or his misfortunes, and 
look his fellow, without fear or favour, in the face, 
is worthy of respect, and the doctrine of equality 
has distinctly raised the character of the mass of 
the American people. The servility which is too 
often the disgrace of Europe is unknown ; and, 
among the many fine qualities of the Americans, 
none are more honourably conspicuous than their 
courage, frankness and independence. . 

So strongly do I feel this that I would not wish 
my observations on some practical applications of 



EQUALITY. 77 

the doctrine of equality to be considered as hostile 
criticism, but rather as passionless comment on 
curious phases of national life. For to English 
prejudice — and prejudice it may be — equality is 
a bitter pill to swallow. I remember a family who 
sold their possessions in England for a settlement 
in the Western States. The soil was favourable, 
the climate congenial, and they might have grown 
to love their new home but for the one circum- 
stance that they were compelled to take their 
meals with the farm labourers. It was no feudal 
survival, with the master above and the servants 
below the salt ; all were socially equal, and their 
helps would at once have left them had they been 
relegated to the kitchen ; so, after a prolonged 
struggle with these, to them, impossible sur- 
roundings, they sold their farm and returned to 
England, poorer if not wiser than they left it. In 
the Northern States, the Irish and negroes almost 
monopolise domestic service, but the first are un- 
trained and the latter are only efficient within 
narrow limits. So difficult and indeed impossible 
is it to procure good servants that the whole style 
of living has been affected by it. The houses are 
strangely small ; and in a city as wealthy as New 
York there are very few which in London would be 
considered of the first rank. The spacious family 



78 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

mansions, which in London are to be counted by 
thousands in the western quarters, hardly exist in 
New York. Fifth Avenue — which, with a few ofif- 
shoots, forms the fashionable quarter — contains but 
few houses above the average of those in a London 
square. Country houses, in the English sense of 
the word, with great establishments of servants of 
every grade, are unknown. The New York million- 
aire, whose wealth makes so imposing a show in 
London or Paris, lives at home in what we should 
consider a very modest fashion. He inhabits a 
house of a dozen rooms, and is served by four or 
five helps. His house is small because he cannot 
procure good servants ; or his servants are few 
as his house is not large enough for a great es- 
tablishment. There should here be some room for 
compensation. An English gentleman with an 
income of ;^ 100,000 a year will keep up a large 
London house and two or three places in the 
country, the expenditure on which swallows up 
the greater portion of his income. Hence it is 
that the English aristocracy are so little dis- 
tinguished for acts of public beneficence ; and 
landlords who amass millions from the ground 
rents of London do nothing to beautify the 
metropolis in which they should take a special 
pride, and the dignity of which they should 



EQUALITY. 79 

associate with their own. The great benefactions 
to the public, colleges, parks, obelisks, and squares, 
are the honourable gifts of merchants and manu- 
facturers, of stock-jobbers and vendors of quack 
medicines. The American millionaire, who by no 
personal extravagance can spend his income, might 
be expected to devote a considerable portion of it 
to the public good. But this is the last thing of 
which he thinks ; and it is only fair to remember 
that riches make to themselves wings and fly 
away with strange rapidity in America. The 
money easily won is easily lost, as the history 
of Monte Carlo may remind us ; and the pile of 
many a Yankee millionaire has been made in 
a manner quite as speculative and no more 
honourable than the chances of the gaming- 
table. 

The American town house which is too small 
to accommodate an establishment of servants 
is obviously too small for a governess, so the 
daughters of the family, deprived of that careful 
home training which is held to be essential in 
England, are exposed to the roughness and the 
independence of a day-school, often in company 
with boys of the same age. The effect of this on 
the young American, of either sex, is not attractive, 
though if American parents approve the system, 



So THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

with its freedom and development of individuality, 
no one else has any right to complain. But I 
believe that it is only approved, because, under 
existing conditions, it is impossible to adopt any 
other ; and the independence of their children, 
which to outsiders seems to savour of disrespect, 
is unnoticed by Americans, who have grown so 
accustomed to it that it has ceased to wound. 
American children are wonderfully bright and 
clever, but their good manners are too often 
conspicuous by their absence. 

Equality, which makes it impossible to procure 
service at home, induces a great part of the 
community to reside in hotels, which form a far 
more important feature in American than in 
English life. The American hotel is to a well 
ordered establishment of the same name in 
Europe what a six franc table-d' Jiote meal at a 
Paris caravansary is to an artistically conceived 
dinner at the Cafe Anglais. Some are better, 
some worse; the Fifth Avenue Hotel or the 
Potter Palmer House at Chicago compare un- 
favourably with Barnum's menagerie, while a very 
few are distinctly good, such as the Windsor in 
New York, which is probably the best in America, 
with some of the old-world politeness, and one of 
the only cooks hitherto discovered on the new 



EQUALITY. 8 1 

continent. The typical American hotel is as 
splendid as colour and gilding can render it ; for 
the law of republican simplicity has determined 
that all public institutions, such as railway cars, 
steamboats and hotels, shall be decorated in the 
fashion which commends itself to the ornate taste 
of the shoddy millionaire, rather than to the more 
sober requirements of his poorer fellow-travellers. 
The ground floor, entrance hall, drinking bar and 
reading-rooms constitute the 'agora' or public 
meeting-place of the entire adult male population. 
Here at mid-day and at night they assemble to 
discuss politics, the stock exchange and the last 
murder ; to quarrel, and smoke, and spit, and 
liquor up ; and the bewildered traveller passes with 
difificulty through their noisy ranks to the counter 
where the hotel clerk, like Rhadamanthus, sits 
supreme above the babel, issuing decrees which 
are without appeal. This young man has formed 
the frequent target for American humour. He is 
said to have been originally created to fill the 
throne of an emperor or a dukedom, but there 
being few of these vacant has condescended to 
accept temporarily a position behind the hotel 
register. But, like the Peri, he does not forget his 
lost paradise, and his austerity, indifference to the 
public, and ignorance of every matter which can 

G 



82 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

be referred to him is probably unsurpassed. He 
is fortunately more insolent to his own countrymen 
than to Englishmen who, not being accustomed to 
salaried incivility, are more disposed to resent it. 
Having secured his room, in which every colour 
and every article of furniture will be an outrage on 
good taste — for the protective tariff compels hotel 
managers to patronize native manufactures — the 
traveller finds himself an unregarded unit in the 
crowd. Service in the proper sense does not 
exist ; and he will find it difficult to get his boots 
blacked unless he descend into the nether regions 
and have them polished on his feet. The dining- 
rooms, as the ground floor, are open to the public ; 
as indeed are the drawing-rooms, called in Irish 
fashion (which indeed is the origin of nine-tenths 
of so called colloquial Americanisms) the parlours ; 
but these last are deserted, so far as the male sex 
are concerned. After dining, they retire to smoke 
and drink, and the emancipated half of the world 
is left to enjoy its freedom alone. 

The difference between the English and the 
American hotel is in the comparative privacy of 
the former. There are now, in London, hotels, 
built or building, as large as any in New York, 
several with upwards of a thousand rooms, but 
they are practically closed to the public. Each 



EQUALITY. 83 

visitor is as secure from outside intrusion as if in 
his own house. The idea of making the hotel the 
common lounge for the loafers of the street corner 
and the drinking bars has fortunately not yet 
commended itself to English managers. 

The American traveller pays a fixed sum for 
board and lodging, a system which has many 
advantages. It is on the whole cheap, and the 
traveller knows precisely what will be the amount 
of his bill. But it demoralizes the national cuisine, 
which is a department into which democratic ideas 
should not be permitted to enter. The American 
people being as accustomed to feed at public 
tables as the Spartans, and the table d'hote being 
accommodated to the simplest palate and the 
shortest purse, the result has been that (putting 
clubs and private houses apart) cookery is an 
unknown art in America. There is abundance 
indeed, but it is the Homeric abundance of 
quartered oxen and sheep roasting whole on the 
spit. Roast and boiled in endless variety ; fish, 
flesh and fowl ; dishes so numerous as to satisfy 
the appetite of a Cyclops, but hardly anything 
lit to eat. The first thing brought by the waiter 
at every meal is a glass of iced water, in itself 
sufficient to spoil both dinner and digestion. The 
victim is then persuaded to declare the ten or 

G 2 



84 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

twenty dishes, from the endless menu, of which 
he will partake ; and he is fortunate if he can 
prevent the waiter from bringing them all at once. 
Ordinarily the diner is seen surrounded by the 
numerous dishes of his choice, eating against time 
to prevent the entrees getting cold while he is 
swallowing his soup. It is not the custom to 
drink wine at dinner, and this alone is fatal to 
the artistic conception of dining. The drinking 
is done at the bar, after meals, standing ; in the 
most unwholesome manner, and of the most un- 
wholesome materials — the hundred mixed liquors 
which are known to fame as American drinks, and 
which by themselves account for any amount of 
dyspepsia and ill health. The coloured waiters 
are far more polite and attentive than their white 
comrades ; but in America, as in Europe, money 
will do much ; though the traveller, if wise, will 
distribute his largess on arrival instead of on 
departure, and can thus ensure, if liberally in- 
clined, as good attendance as he can desire. The 
Americans do not ordinarily fee the servants ; but 
without this precaution, the foreigner may starve 
in the midst of plenty. There is one restaurant 
in New York of world-wide reputation — Del- 
monico's — at which the cuisine is only good b}^ 
comparison with the general monotony of bad 



EQUALITY. 85 

cooking, though it is asserted to be superior to any 
estabh'shment in London or Paris. 

In travelling, the doctrine of equality has been 
tempered by the enterprise of Mr. Pullman, whose 
saloon and sleeping cars form, to all intents and 
purposes, a separate and higher class, although 
this idea is abhorrent to true Republicanism. 
However this may be, the rich and the poor, 
except on those less important lines which know 
not Mr. Pullman, are as much separated in travel- 
ling as in England. To compensate for this 
deviation from Republican principle, the eman- 
cipated negro attendant will endeavour to illustrate 
and assert the law of equality by taking his seat 
in the car, placing his dirty boots on the opposite 
cushions, and generally acting as new-born freedom 
suggests ; and, in New Mexico, I have sat at 
dinner next to the engine-driver, who was a 
most worthy and amusing citizen, and to whose 
presence only hypercriticism would have objected, 
had he condescended, before joining the ladies and 
gentlemen, to remove the grease and soot from 
his face and hands. The person who in America 
impressed me as possessing power of the most 
absolute kind, before whose authority that of the 
President himself seemed to pale, was the railway 
guard, or conductor. Even the hotel clerk is a less 



86 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

imposing personage in the Republic. Travelling 
many thousand miles through the States, I watched 
the conductor under many conditions and on many 
lines of railway ; but I do not remember to have 
seen one who was ordinarily civil or who had the 
faintest knowledge of any subject connected with 
the line on which he was employed. Where or 
when the train stopped ; where refreshments were 
to be procured ; at what junction the traveller 
should change carriages ; on all such subjects his 
mind was a blank. The railway company which 
employed him was a monopoly which systemati- 
cally disregarded and despised the public by which 
it prospered, and he too acknowledged no obliga- 
tion of politeness or information. He did not 
consider himself paid to be civil or to answer the 
wild questions of unreasoning travellers who ought 
to purchase enigmatical guide books and discover 
for themselves the mysteries of the road. 

Nothing is more striking than the patience with 
which the free American citizen bears the insolence 
of office ; the rudeness- of ticket-collectors, the 
unnecessary violence of the police, and the general 
contempt of every petty employe of the govern- 
ment or of private companies, who, one and all, 
seem to consider the public they serve as a beast 
of burden to be beaten or driven at their pleasure. 



EQUALITY, 87 

We are accustomed to this official aggressiveness 
and petty insolence in France or Italy, but it seems 
strangely out of place in an Anglo-Saxon Republic. 
For this temper is altogether foreign to the people. 
There is no more kindly and considerate person in 
the world than the unofficial American. Hospi- 
table, generous and warm-hearted, he will take 
infinite trouble to assist a stranger, and if you ask 
him to direct you in the public street, will probably 
walk far out of his way to point out your destina- 
tion. But politics have so demoralised office that 
with its possession his whole temper seems changed. 
The old wine of authority is too strong for Re- 
publican bottles, and next to being an official 
yourself, there is hardly a greater misfortune than 
to have to conduct dealings with one. 

One of the most curious social results of equality 
is the supposed right which it gives to one portion 
of the community to interfere with the private and 
domestic concerns of another. Even the President 
of the United States is not above such interference. 
Mr. R. B. Hayes was a total abstainer, and nothing 
stronger than lemonade was to be procured at the 
White House during his occupancy. When Presi- 
dent Arthur, a temperate and courteous gentleman, 
succeeded to office, a committee of ladies is said to 
have waited upon him and informed him that he 



88 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

must drink only water ; but he courageously 
informed them that he should regulate his dinner- 
table without their assistance. Not long since, the 
Free-Will Baptists of Minnesota passed a resolu- 
tion warmly approving the noble and economical 
spirit of Mr. Hayes in serving water to his guests, 
and viewing "with growing alarm the use of intoxi- 
cants by President Arthur." This concern for the 
manners and morals of the highest officials, how- 
ever impertinent, has not been altogether unjusti- 
fied, for every citizen is a possible occupant of the 
Presidential chair, and may carry there the habits 
he has acquired during his earlier days of rail- 
splitting or cattle-farming. I remember a former 
President with whom sobriety was an exceptional, 
and indeed a phenomenal, phase of existence ; and 
a United States minister at a European Court 
who was too uncertain of the direction in which 
his legs would take him to receive the Royalties 
who had honoured his evening party. 

When Presidents can claim no immunity from 
the shrill lectures of prohibitionist missionaries, it 
is clear that the rank and file of simple citizens 
cannot hope to drink in peace. Against this per- 
secution the Germans have stoutly fought, and are 
prepared for any sacrifice rather than lose their 
national beer. Where they are most numerous the 



EQUALITY. 89 

prohibitionists have had least success ; but there 
are wide districts in which no intoxicating beverage 
is to be procured without a resort to humiliating 
subterfuges. The people no doubt drink a great 
deal, and most crimes in America, as in England, 
have their origin in intoxication. But there are 
few drunken people to be seen ; and whether the 
liquor trade be a blessing or a curse, it is not for a 
Republic which professes to uphold individual 
liberty to insist upon people abstaining against 
their will. We have, however, no occasion to cross 
the ocean to see fervent Liberals preaching a com- 
pulsory temperance in opposition to the true spirit 
of Liberalism. 



CHAPTER VI. 

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

It was with much interest and some anxiety 
that I went to Chickering Hall to hear Matthew 
Arnold's first lecture in New York, for he had 
freely condemned the Americans in former days as 
a race of Philistines, and they have long memories. 
We English are accustomed to Mr. Arnold when, 
like Balaam, he starts on a mission of cursing. 
Whether we drink champagne, or sand the sugar, 
or beat our wives, we know that there is no escape 
from condemnation. Unless we can take refuge 
with the few elect in his private ark, we belong to 
an upper class materialised, a middle class vul- 
garised, or a lower class brutalised. But the Ame- 
ricans were not used to this drastic treatment, and 
had shown some temper when told that, even if 
they had fewer barbarians and less mob, they were 
an unredeemed and irredeemable vulgar middle 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 91 

class. Chickering Hall, however, displayed no 
signs of hostility. On the contrary, when Mr. 
Parke Godwin had ended a laboured and perfervid 
introduction, the great English critic was received 
by a crowded house with every sign of sympathy 
and respect. There was not a vacant chair, and 
the audience was evidently largely composed of 
the most educated and cultured classes, and in- 
cluded many ladies. But the lecture, as such, 
was a complete failure. Matthew Arnold says he 
dislikes public speaking, and certainly his voice is 
— or was — unequal to the demands of a well-filled 
hall. Reading his lecture with the manuscript 
close to his eyes, placing a strong accent on the 
penultimate or ante-penultimate syllable, and 
dropping the last altogether, allowing the voice to 
so sink at the close of a sentence that the last 
words were inaudible, without gesture or expres- 
sion, Mr. Matthew Arnold com-bines in himself all 
the possible faults of a public lecturer. Sitting 
ten rows in front of the reader, I found it impos- 
sible to hear the whole of any sentence or to follow 
the argument of the address. Occasionally, a 
quotation more or less familiar could be picked 
from the general monotone — as Dr. Johnson's 
declaration that " Patriotism is the last refuge of 
a scoundrel," or Plato's description of Athenian 



92 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

society : " There is but a very small remnant of 
honest followers of wisdom, and they who are of 
these few and have tasted how sweet a possession 
is wisdom, and who can fully see the madness of 
the multitude, what are they to do ? " 

But these were mere oases of sound in a desert 
of inaudibility; and of the fifteen hundred persons 
present, perhaps a hundred understood the lecture, 
to some four hundred an occasional sentence was 
vouchsafed, while a thousand heard nothing. An 
American audience is wonderfully patient and 
generous ; and although at first from several parts 
of the hall came unavailing cries of " Louder," 
" Can't hear you," yet, when it was thoroughly 
realised that remonstrance and entreaty were in 
vain, the audience resigned themselves to the 
enjoyment of their Barmecide feast in a manner 
both amusing and pathetic. The lecture, if audible, 
would hardly have satisfied an American audience. 
Its purport seemed to be that majorities were 
always vicious and wrong; and that the only 
advantage to America in her great and increasing 
population was that, in so vast a multitude of fools 
and knaves, there must be a considerable "remnant" 
who, if fortune were favourable,' which the lecturer 
did not anticipate, might redeem and transform the 
corrupt mass. Mr. Matthew Arnold is very likely 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 93 

right, but with these sentiments America has no 
sympathy. It holds that he wastes his rare powers 
in futile criticism of the Philistines, who are the 
practical men of the world and who do its real 
work. The night after his lecture, the well-known 
journalist, Mr. Dana, in the same hall, repudiated 
his doctrine, and declared that the facts of America 
and Europe contradicted his theory ; that in Eng- 
land and France there was little or no political 
progress, that in democratic institutions and the 
principle of equality were the salvation of the 
human race ; while material triumphs by man 
over nature contained the condition of progress, 
a work independent of poets and essayists like 
Mr. Arnold. There can be no doubt that Mr. 
Dana truly interprets the feeling of his countrymen, 
who are satisfied with themselves and do not care 
to be improved or instructed by any teacher, how- 
ever illustrious. Mr. Matthew Arnold, piloted by 
Mr. D'Oyley Carte, and inaudibly lecturing to 
New York society, too painfully recalls Samson 
grinding corn for the Philistines in Gaza. 

If the future of America were of little Importance 
to humanity, the inquiry as to whether its in- 
herited or acquired sweetness and light satisfied 
the severe demands of Mr. Matthew Arnold would 
have no more interest than the disputes of mediaeval 



94 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

casuistry. But the destiny of this great country 
and this brave and energetic race is of supreme 
importance to the world, and especially to 
England. Before children now born shall have 
grown grey there will be but three Great Powers 
in the civilised world : the Greater Britain, Russia, 
and the United States. France, Germany, and 
Austria may still be prosperous and maintain 
vast standing armies as to-day ; but to the Anglo- 
Saxon and the Slav races will have fallen 
the dominion of the world. We have thus a 
direct interest in ascertaining the direction in 
which American civilisation tends, and the force 
and sweep of the currents which reach our shores 
from the western side of the Atlantic. Of what 
temper is this strange creation, whose origin was 
indeed due to England, but over whose growth 
she has had no control ? Is it a monster, like that 
wrought by Frankenstein, eager to confuse and 
destroy; or is it but a new avatar of the Goddess of 
Liberty, who has softly lit, dove-like, with white 
shining wings, on the western shore ? The more 
urgent of these questions will best be answered 
when we later consider the tendency of the political 
institutions of the United States. Here I would 
only touch on those lighter subjects, culture, 
literature, and art, which are suggested by Mr. 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 



95 



Matthew Arnold's visit to America, and which 
have an influence only second to political institu- 
tions on the mental and moral growth of a people. 
Culture is essentially aristocratic in the highest and 
unconventional sense of the term, and flourishes 
best among a class whose inherited wealth 
and leisure permit them to find their interest in 
intellectual pursuits rather than in money-making, 
which is the most absorbing as it is the most 
demoralising of occupations. Art is, in a great 
measure, dependent on patronage ; and, if the art 
is to be worthy, the patronage must not be of the 
uneducated multitude, but of the instructed and 
cultivated, who are everywhere few in number, 
but who will be found most rarely in democracies. 
The Bonanza king of San Francisco, who is re- 
ported to have successfully sued a railway company 
for having delivered to him a cast of the Venus 
of the Louvre without the arms, which he insisted 
should have accompanied the goddess, may, under 
instructed direction, stock museums with foreign 
works of art, but cannot aid the development of 
native talent. The political bias of republics to 
equality; the popular dishke of inherited rank and 
wealth ; the redistribution of acquired property, 
all react unfavourably on culture, and discourage 
the growth of the leisured and refined class in 



96 THE GRKAT REPUBLIC. 

whose existence is the best hope for the creation 
and the appreciation of works of art. It cannot 
be denied that there have been times and places 
in which there seemed to exist a phenomenal 
love of art among the people generally, as in 
Athens and Florence, which were republics in 
name though aristocratic in spirit ; but although 
the popular taste was refined in these cities, yet 
the community affected was small, and had been 
educated to a high sense of beauty by the 
enlightened munificence of wealthy or noble 
families. The natural capacity of European races 
for artistic representation of beauty differs, not 
only in degree, but in kind ; and it is not likely 
that Anglo-Saxons will ever, in music, painting, 
or sculpture, reach the standard of Greece or 
Italy, though they have no superiors in literary 
achievement. It might have been supposed that 
the free air of a republic v/ould be favourable to 
every class of intellectual effort ; and that its 
citizens would easily surpass those countries 
where knowledge is held in chains, or where 
authority, fashion, and prescription restrict on 
every side the movements of genius. But this 
assumption would not be supported by histor}'-, 
which shows that in England and France, the 
most active intellectual periods, richest in works 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 97 

of the highest imagination and power, were those 
when despotism was the rule of government, and 
reverence to authority was most conspicuous in 
the people. The truth seems to be, although 
the question is deserving of more attention than 
has yet been paid to it, that the atmosphere of 
a republic is unfavourable to art. The lamp of 
artistic truth burns with a feeble flame ; and 
mediocrity is allowed to take the highest place. 
The general level is so unbroken that it is 
difficult for Genius to find any elevation from which 
to take its flight. The absence of height to train 
the mental eye, injures the sense of proportion, and 
permits an exaggerated estimate of artistic 
excellence. If a careful and impartial review of 
the intellectual productions of the United States 
since their foundation, or during the last hundred 
years, be made, it will be found that, in no de- 
partment of art, has any work, drama, novel, poem, 
painting, or musical composition been produced 
which could justly be placed in the first class. In 
science, America has been more distinguished^ as 
might have been expected from a practical people 
devoted to industrial pursuits. But the absolute 
dearth of all work of the highest artistic value is 
most striking. In literature, there are many names 
justly held in honour and some authors whose 

H 



98 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

works have won a wide reputation ; essayists and 
historians as Irving, Emerson, Bancroft, Prescott, 
and Motley : poets like Bryant, Longfellow, 
Whittier, and Lowell : and novelists like Cooper, 
Holmes, Hawthorne, and Howells. Yet, although 
some of these writers have attained that mastery 
over style which Matthew Arnold seems to con- 
sider the chief sign of literary power, placing men 
like Addison, La Bruyere, Cicero, and Voltaire, in 
the front rank of letters, no American has, 
so far, shown himself possessed of constructive or 
imaginative power in any high degree. The 
stormy history of the young Republic, and the 
natural beauties of a new Continent have inspired no 
national poem ; nor indeed any poetry which can be 
ranked as of the highest order. Twenty years ago, 
in England, the poetry best known and most 
delighted in, after Tennyson, by the majority of 
readers was that of Longfellow, and its popularity 
was well deserved, for its simple charm, and pure, 
lofty spirit appeal directly to the heart. But when 
compared with his . English contemporaries 
Tennyson and Browning, it is at once seen 
within what narrow limits the genius of Longfellow 
is confined. In dramatic work, which is the 
highest and most imaginative expression of 
literary genius, America has done nothing whatever ; 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 99 

though it must not be forgotten that England, 
during the present century, has been ahnost as 
barren of high dramatic ability. Even in the 
dramatic representations of the stage, American 
artists appear ordinarily devoid of that imaginative 
power which enables the actor to so seize and em- 
body the very life and individuality of a character 
as to touch spectators with that swift and sudden 
sympathy which makes of the dramatic art the very 
mirror of nature. Booth, and to a less degree, 
Jefferson, may be held to possess something of 
this power, but it is altogether absent from the work 
of most American actors, as might be seen this 
season in London, where Mary Anderson and 
Lawrence Barrett have drawn large houses : one, as 
a pretty and picturesque woman, the other as an 
accomplished and well-trained artist, without pos- 
sessing the power of stirring the faintest emotion 
in the spectators or conveying any impression 
of reality in their several parts. That this defect 
is less inherent in the actor than due to the 
unsympathetic and uncongenial atmosphere in 
which he has been trained, seems likely when it is 
remembered that the majority of American actors 
are English or Irish by origin, and indeed the 
American stage is as rich in brogue as if it were 
recruited direct from Cork. The low ebb of the 
dramatic art in America is the more striking from 

H 2 



loo THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

the wide and deep love for the theatre among the 
people. In no country are there more numerous, 
better arranged or more handsome theatres, or 
more enthusiastic and quick-witted audiences. 
Every point is at once appreciated by the house ; 
and dramatic criticism is often both learned and 
discriminating. 

The chief hope for American literature and art 
is, that as they outgrow English influences, they 
may become more robust and national. No one 
would wish to deprive our kinsmen across the 
ocean of their common inheritance in the glories of 
English literature, which forms the most powerful 
of the ties which bind us in amity together. But 
the overpowering splendour and richness of that 
literature have had an enfeebling and crushing 
effect upon American writers. Year by year, 
English influence grows visibly less, and this is 
a healthy sign. Even the extravagant estimate 
placed in America on the work of some con- 
temporary native authors* which, judged by our 
standards, appears worthy of but small admiration, 
shows the growth of an independent national spirit 
without which no literature can be excellent or 
durable. In other departments of art, where 
Enghsh influence is necessarily weak, such as 
painting and sculpture, Americans are advancing 
to an honourable place ; though they do not draw 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. loi 

theii* inspiration from native air, but from Paris and 
Rome. In music, their time has not yet come ; 
though, as the best of so-called English music, now 
taking a high place in the artistic history of the 
century, is Irish in origin, and as there are more 
Irishmen in America than in Ireland itself, it may 
be hoped that republican surroundings may not 
forbid its successful cultivation there. 

There can be no more potent means of increas- 
ing and deepening popular culture than by the 
introduction of art into the common ways of 
domestic life ; employing taste and beauty to 
dignify the most ordinary articles of furniture, 
ornament, and dress. In this direction, free trade 
has done much for England, and of late years the 
standard of good taste in domestic life has greatly 
risen. But, in America, the protective tariff has 
prevented the general use of foreign manufactures 
with the consequence that most of the work is crude 
and inartistic. Whether a love of beauty has, as yet, 
taken much possession of the English people may 
be doubted ; but improvement is everywhere visible, 
and comfort and good taste are becoming, every 
year, more common in the homes of the English 
artisan. I will conclude this chapter with an 
extract from the letter of the American cor- 
respondent of the Pittsburg Dispatch, who had been 
sent to England to examine into the question of 



,o2 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

wages and labour, and which from such a source is 
especially interesting. I would particularly com- 
mend it to the attention of English working men, 
who are disposed to think their own class is more 
favourably situated in the States than in England. 
It deals with a subject by no means foreign to 
"sweetness and light," for wholesome and well- 
ordered homes are the soil from which true culture 
must spring. 

" A walk from WoWerhampton, with its 100,000 inhabitants, 
to Birmingham, with its 400,000, is through a succession of 
villages, which form an almost continuous town, through a 
forest of chimneys which send forth pillars of cloud which 
obscure the sun by day, and pillars of fire which outshine 
the moon at night. The vast bulk of the smoke is outside of 
Birmingham, so that it is less beclouded than one would antici- 
pate from its reputation. It is not by any means so enshrouded 
as the ' Birmingham of America ; ' but its smoke and soot are 
not hemmed in by high hills, but are constantly dispersed by 
the breezes from the Channel and the Welsh mountains. Yet 
in this field are manufactured not only incomputable quantities 
of raw iron and large machinery, but thousands of kinds of 
small articles in immense bulk, guns, swords, all kinds of 
brass and ormolu articles, jewellery, presses, pins, buttons, 
bicycles, needles, fish-hooks,, money, not only for the Home 
Government, but for a dozen other governments, and innumer- 
able other things which one always knew were made some- 
where but never knew the place. 

" And now, let me say briefly, and once for all, that a careful 
inspection of the localities where working people most do 
congregate in this wonderful world of manufactures, has proved 
to me, as it will prove to any one taking similar pains, that 
here, where one expects to find ' pauper labour,' by comparison 
with America there is a condition of comfort in habitation, 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 103 

clothing, and food, which cannot be excelled in any American 
manufacturing locality. This may be treason, but if it is, my 
protectionist friends are at hberty to make the most of it. I do 
not assert that the condition of these workmen is what it ought 
to be. I only assert that if it be worse than that of American 
workmen, then the difference is concealed with wonderful 
success. I am not advancing by any means the opinion that 
it is time to apply the theory of free-trade to America, but 
merely reiterating what I have often said and always believed, 
that the assertion of republican politicians that protection was 
in the interest of the working-man was buncombe, for if it 
was of any benefit at all the working-man got none of it, but 
the capitalist all. If I was not altogether certain of my 
premises then, I am now. I will agree to exhibit better houses 
for working people, with just as ample food and comfortable 
clothing, and as many bank depositors in this Birmingham 
district, according to ratio of population, as can be found 
in any manufacturing district of America. It would make 
the most prejudiced and most loyal Pittsburger ashamed of 
his own city, to note here the actual superiority in comfort 
and cleanliness of the streets and houses where live the 
common working classes. Courts, alleys, and domiciles are 
clean, and lack the foul odors which are smelled everywhere 
on the back streets and alleys of Pittsburg. I searched in 
vain for a plague spot. I asked for the localities where there 
were the most poor, and went there ; I propounded all sorts 
of impudent questions to the inhabitants ; I penetrated to the 
obscurest courts and alleys, making inquiries for imaginary 
persons my excuse, and my conclusion was that, so long as 
we must have a poor class— a class which must struggle hard 
for bare necessities— it would be well to have them live as 
they do here, if possible. Everything, too, speaks of good 
government. Hell-holes, such as exist in some parts of 
Pittsburg, seem to be unknown here. The gin-mills and tap- 
rooms are compelled to close promptly at the hour fixed by- 
law. To judge from the police statistics, crime is here reduced 
to a minimum." 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 

Some two years ago a political satire was 
published in New York under the title of Solid for 
MiilJiooly} which did not receive from English 
politicians the attention which it undoubtedly 
deserved. It was not to be seen on the club tables 
in Pall Mall, nor was it in demand at Mudie's, and 
is now, I understand, out of print. Nevertheless, 
its interest is so great, and the conclusions which 
seem naturally to follow its story pierce the soul 
and marrow of modern English politics with so 
true and acute a rapier-point, that representative 
Radicals like Mr. Chamberlain, or disguised 
Radicals, as is Lord Randolph Churchill, might 
well republish the work for gratuitous distribution 
in the still unenlightened and unregenerate con- 
stituencies. Solid for Midhooly purported to be a 

^ By Rufus E. Shapley, of Philadelphia. 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 105 

new and novel satire on the Boss system in 
American politics, in which the mysterious 
methods of the leaders, the Ring and the Boss, 
were laid bare ; and although, for the American 
public, which the chief living exponent of the 
science of political corruption asserts to have 
greater patience and longer ears than any other 
animal in the New World, there could be little 
that was novel in the revelations, there is much 
which is, fortunately, both new and useful for 
Englishmen. 

It cannot be expected that the arid wilderness of 
American politics should ever become a fair and 
pleasant garden in which English students may- 
wander with delight and contentment. The sub- 
ject is strange and distasteful, and from most points 
of view unprofitable, and Americans themselves 
turn from it with disgust. If but few educated 
Englishmen could explain the differences in dogma 
between the Republican and Democratic parties, 
an average American could do little more, seeing 
that to the eyes of impartial observers the only 
conflict between political parties is as to which 
should obtain the larger proportion of the spoils of 
victory — the fat offices given to unscrupulous 
wirepullers ; judgeships, the reward of the prostitu- 
tion of justice ; and contracts by which the people 



io6 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

pay three dollars for every one which is expended 
on its behalf. 

There is, however, one light in which American 
politics have for Englishmen an engrossing interest, 
namely, the effect which democratic principles, 
carried to their extreme logical conclusions, have 
had upon a race identical in many particulars with 
the English from which it has sprung. Has this 
effect been such as to encourage us to apply these 
principles at home ? Has the result been a nobler 
view of the obligations of citizenship ; a more 
generous and unselfish use of wealth ; a higher and 
purer municipal administration ; a more patriotic, 
farsighted, and courageous foreign policy ? And 
even should a favourable answer be returned to 
these inquiries, there remains for Englishmen the 
practical question whether, if undiluted democracy 
be suited to the conditions of America, with its 
vast homogeneous territory and a population still 
scanty proportional to its area, secure from all 
foreign attack and self-contained and self-sufficient 
in its resources, we could reasonably expect that it 
should be equally successful in England. For this 
country is the centre and omphalos of a world-wide 
empire, confronted in every land and on every sea 
with enemies or rivals ; with an overgrown popula- 
tion crowded into cities and dependent on others 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 107 

for their very bread, and already enjoying a system 
of government which is not only the envy of less 
fortunate peoples, but which has had the force to 
make us, and may still possess the inherent virtue 
to maintain us, first among the nations of the 
earth ? 

A novel called Democracy, giving a clever and 
amusing sketch of Washington society and the 
political intrigues which have their origin and 
development in the capital of the United States, 
excited considerable interest in England a short 
time ago. It was written with much spirit, and its 
frankness was so condemnatory of American in- 
stitutions that it was first supposed to be written 
by an Englishman. But there are no more severe 
critics of their political system than the Americans 
themselves, and the authorship of Democracy is no 
secret at Washington, where I have met more than 
one of the persons whose presentment is supposed 
to be given in the novel. Another book lately 
published — A Winter in Washington — though of 
doubtful taste, and below criticism as a work of 
literary art, is fully as outspoken regarding the 
low tone of morality which prevails in political 
circles. But, Solid for Mulhooly, the work which 
I have taken "as the text for this article, is of a 
different quality. Its style disdains those half- 



io8 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

lights and shadows and reticences which belong 
to romance, the conventional glamour which 
artistically obscures the naked truth. It carries 
the American political system into the dissecting- 
room, and pitilessly exposes the hidden seat of its 
disease. While Democracy shows the ultimate 
result of official corruption in the lobbies and 
drawing-rooms of Washington, Solid for MulJiooly 
discloses its genesis in the drinking-saloon and the 
gutter. Democracy differs from it as a rainbow 
differs from the mathematical formulae which 
express the laws that determine its shape and 
colour. A short sketch of the plot, showing- 
how a penniless adventurer became Member of 
Congress, rich w^ithout toil, like the lilies, in- 
fluential without character, and famous through 
his very infamy, will not be unprofitable. 

Michael Mulhooly was born in those conditions 
which experience has shown to be eminently 
favourable to prominence in American statesman- 
ship — a mud cabin among the bogs of County 
Tyrone, which he shared with his parents, his 
ten brothers and sisters, and the pig. Fortune 
sent him early to America, where his struggles 
and subsequent successes form the subject of the 
story. Epitomised as was his history by the 
journal of the Reform party, it read thus : — 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 109 

" A bogtrotter by birth ; a waif washed up on our shores ; 
a scuUion boy in a gin-mill frequented by thieves and 
shoulder-hitters ; afterwards a bar-tender in and subsequently 
the proprietor of this low groggery ; a repeater ^ before he 
was of age ; a rounder, bruiser, and shoulder-hitter ; then 
made an American citizen by fraud after a residence of but two 
years ; a leader of a gang of repeaters before the ink on his 
fraudulent naturalisation papers was dry ; then a corrupt and 
perjured election officer ; then for years a corrupt and perjured 
member of the Municipal Legislature, always to be hired or 
bought by the highest bidder, and always an uneducated, 
vulgar, flashily-dressed, obscene creature of the Ring which 
made him what he is, and of which he is a worthy represen- 
tative ; such, in brief, is the man who has been forced upon 
this party by the most shameless frauds as its candidate for 
the American Congress. This is filthy language, but it is the 
only way in which to describe the filthy subject to which it 
refers, as every man who reads it must admit that it is only 
the simple truth. 

" Is it possible that the American people are compelled to 
scour the gutter, the gin-mill, and the brothel for a candidate 
for Congress ? Is it possible that the Ring which has already 
plundered the city for so many years, and which has so long 
abused our patience with its arbitrary nominations of the 
most unworthy people for the most honourable and responsible 
offices, will be permitted to crown its infamies by sending to 
Congress this creature who represents nothing decent and 
nothing fit to be named to decent ears ? " 



1 Repeating is an amusing game much played at American 
elections. The repeater, who, if possible, should be a professional 
bully and prizefighter, represents himself to be and votes for some 
member of the party opposed to that which employs him. When 
the true voter appears at the poll he is assailed as a fraudulent person 
who desires to register twice, and is kicked and beaten by the 
repeater and his friends. This game causes much innocent 
amusement. 



tio THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

Though all this, with much more that the 
indignant journal wrote, was not only true but 
notorious, it had no effect upon the foregone 
conclusion of the contest. The Boss, who held 
in his hand the fifty thousand Irish Catholic 
votes of New York, called upon one of the judges 
whom he had ''made" to convict of libel the 
journal which had dared to tell the truth and 
condemn his favoured nominee. Justice was 
dishonoured and the truth was condemned. 
Meanwhile the campaign was fought between 
honesty and corruption. The candidate of the 
Reform party was a young man of good family, 
the highest character, possessed of wealth, genius, 
and eloquence, and he had at his back all the 
voters of respectability and position. But he did 
not condescend to those arts which could alone 
insure success. He did not visit bar-rooms, or 
drink with and treat the party-workers, or bribe or 
cajole; and he declared war to the knife against 
the Boss and the Boss system, and the Ring, and 
the whole gang of confederated thieves who had 
for so long laughed at and plundered the people. 
The result was what might have been foreseen. 
The leaders, the Ring, and the Boss, and their 
thousands of dependents, were "solid for 
Mulhooly," who was elected Member of Congress 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. in 

by the grace of the municipal gods ; manhood 
suffrage was vindicated, and the corrupt, obscure 
adventurer represented *'a Government of the 
people, by the people, and for the people." 

It will be asserted that this satire is exaggerated, 
and a caricature of the truth. But this is not the 
opinion of those educated and high-principled 
Americans with whom I have talked in the large 
cities, such as Washington, New York, Phil- 
adelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, or Denver. They 
are generally willing to discuss the political 
situation with all frankness if they be only 
approached with discretion. Should the traveller 
commence with abuse of American institutions he 
will naturally meet with a rebuff; but should he 
sympathetically praise an administration which 
professes to be of and for the people, his listener 
will quickly open the floodgates of his invective 
against it. From my Colorado note-book I 
extract the ipsissima verba of one of the most 
prosperous and distinguished citizens of that 
State. "Politics," said he, ''are nothing but a 
trade by which to live and grow fat, and an evil 
and a stinking trade. No one who respects 
himself can join it, and should a respectable 
man be chosen for office he refuses to accept 
the nomination. Everything connected with it 



112 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

is corrupt ; and success being impossible to an 
honest man, the dirty work is left to the 
scallawags and scoundrels who live by it, and 
who degrade the name of politics throughout 
America." 

The City of New York has, for many years, 
been one of the most striking and convenient 
illustrations of what is known in America as 
Boss rule, and the many millions that it has cost 
the people, in waste, peculation, and undisguised 
and unblushing robbery, form the price which 
they have had to pay for the pretence of freedom. 
Matters are now less openly scandalous than of 
old, but the same system is in full force. Boss 
Kelly, who sways the destinies of New York, 
has been able, from his near connection with 
an Irish cardinal, to defend his position with 
spiritual as well as temporal weapons, and the 
whole Irish Catholic population vote solid as he 
bids them. The result of a generation of this 
regime has been disastrous. The commercial 
capital of the United .States may now be fairly 
reckoned, for size and population, the second 
city in the world, if Brooklyn, New Jersey, and 
the suburbs be included within its boundaries. 
Its property is assessed at fifteen hundred million 
dollars, its foreign commerce is not far from a 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. ii, 

billion dollars, while its domestic trade reaches 
many hundred millions. But there is hardly a 
European city of any importance which is not 
infinitely its superior in municipal administration, 
convenience, beauty, and architectural pretensions- 
With the exception of the Post Office and the 
unfinished Catholic cathedral, which is neither in 
size nor design a cathedral at all, there is scarcely 
a building which repays a visit. The City Hall, 
which cost ten or twelve millions of dollars, is 
certainly worth inspection as an instance of what 
swindling on a gigantic scale is able to accomplish ; 
as is the Brooklyn Bridge, which cost seventeen 
millions, or three times the original estimate, and 
which was further unnecessary, as a subway would 
have been more convenient and have cost much 
less. Local taxation is crushingly heavy, and so 
inequitably assessed that the millionaires pay 
least and the poor most. The paving of the 
streets is so rough as to recall Belgrade or 
Petersburg ; the gas is as bad as the pavement ; 
and it is only in Broadway and portions of Fifth 
Avenue that an unsystematic use of the electric 
light creates a brilliancy which but heightens the 
contrast with the gloom elsewhere. The Central 
Park, so called from being a magnificent expanse 
of wilderness in the centre of nothing, is ill-kept 

I 



114 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

and ragged, and at night is unsafe for either sex. 
The fares of hack-carriages are four to five times 
as high as in London. The police is inefficient, 
arbitrary, and corrupt. At its head are four Com- 
missioners, who are poHticians in the American 
sense and nothing more. They are virtually 
appointed by the aldermen, who have authority 
to confirm or reject the mayor's nomination of 
heads of departments. The aldermen are, in many 
cases, persons to whom the description of Michael 
Mulhooly might apply — politicians of the drinking- 
saloons, the tools and slaves of the Boss who made 
them and whose orders they unhesitatingly obey. 
When a respectable mayor has chanced to be 
appointed, he has declared it useless to nominate 
good men to office, and has lowered his appoint- 
ments to the level of the confirming aldermen. 
The Comptroller, who is the financial head of 
the city, expending between thirty and forty 
millions of dollars annually, the Commissioners 
of Excise, Taxes, Charities, Fire, Health, and 
Public Works, are all controlled, approved and 
virtually appointed by the aldermen, who are 
directed by the Boss. Even the eleven police 
judges, who should be the independent ex- 
pounders and enforcers of the criminal law, 
are appointed by the same agency, so that if. 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 115 

their origin be traced to its first cause they are 
the nominees of the criminal classes they have 
to try and punish. The result is that it is 
impossible to procure the adequate punishment 
of any official, however criminal, since he wa"s 
appointed as a political partisan. One or two 
instances, almost at random, may be cited in 
illustration of this. While I was in New York 
a policeman, named McNamara, killed a drunken 
but perfectly quiet and inoffensive citizen, named 
John Smith, by blows on his head and neck with 
a loaded club. There was no provocation, and 
even New York was profoundly moved by the 
outrage, although the police are there accustomed 
to use their clubs on even orderly crowds in a 
manner which would not be tolerated for a day 
in England. But while a verdict of murder or 
aggravated manslaughter would alone have met 
the merits of the case, McNamara was found 
guilty of assault in the third degree, and sentenced 
to a nominal punishment. In the case of the 
numerous catastrophes on railways and steamers 
in and near New York, due to gross negligence 
and causing the wanton slaughter of numerous 
citizens, no official has for years past been 
punished. An inspector's certificate is the only 
guarantee of security of the num.erous passenger 

I 2 



Ii6 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

steamboats which ply on the waters of the city. But 
in August last, when the Riverdale steamer blew 
up and sank, the boiler was found so corroded 
that a knife-blade was easily thrust through a 
piece of iron which was originally an inch and 
a quarter thick ; while the inspector who had 
certified that the boiler was in good order stated 
on inquiry, that he did not know that the boiler 
was corroded because he had never examined the 
inside. Inspectors of this calibre are appointed to 
certify to the soundness of the boilers of ocean 
steamers, and the chief engineer of one of these 
told me that the inspector w^ho had looked at the 
outside of the engines and had signed the required 
certificate, when asked whether he was not going 
to examine the interior of the boilers, confessed 
that such an examination would give him no 
information, as he was altogether ignorant of 
the construction of engines or boilers. 

Nor are public interests and private rights in 
property more respected than personal safety is 
secured. In London we see Mr. Bowles fighting 
against a railway which is to pass underneath the 
parks without once appearing at the surface, and 
even those who consider his zeal excessive will yet 
admit that this jealousy of any invasion of popular 
rights is wholesome and admirable. Yet, in New 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 117 

York, elevated railways, on iron pillars level with 
the first-floor windows, have been run throuf^h 
many of the principal streets, without a dollar 
of compensation having been paid to any one. 
It may be that the ultimate result has been to 
raise the rents of the shops in these thoroughfares, 
but this does not alter the fact that the original 
construction was an outrage on the rights of 
private property and a hideous disfigurement of 
the public streets. 

The carcase over which the New York vultures 
are now gathered together is the new aqueduct, 
which is estimated to cost from twenty to thirty 
millions of dollars, but which, if the precedents of 
the County Court House and the Brooklyn Bridge 
be followed, will probably cost sixty millions. 
Here is a prize worthy of Tammany and a contest 
— a mine rich in jobbery and corruption for years 
to come ; and there is no doubt that, before the 
work is completed, many patriotic Irish statesmen 
of the Mulhooly type, who are now loafing around 
the saloons on the chance of a free drink, will be 
clad in purple and fine linen and cheerfully chmbing 
the venal steps which lead to the Capitol. 

The mal-administration of New York has, at 
the present time, a very near and personal interest 
for Londoners. It is proposed by the Government 



Ii8 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

to place the administration of the vast metropoh's, 
with its limitless wealth and multiplied interests, 
in the bands of one governing body, which there 
is no reason to believe will attam a very high 
standard of wisdom, virtue, and administrative 
ability. The Guildhall Parliament will be no 
more than a glorified vestry, with its jobs and 
personalities and indifference to the public interest; 
and it is unlikely that candidates of distinction 
will present themselves or be elected should they 
be nominated. It is true that, in England, politics 
are still a profession for honest men, and on the 
London School Board many persons of emi- 
nence have shown themselves willing to perform 
arduous and ungrateful work for the public, 
But the experience of this Board is not alto- 
gether hopeful, and able and accomplished candi- 
dates have too often been rejected for pretentious 
b.usybodies. It wmII be the duty not only of 
the Government but of Parliament generally, to 
gonsider carefully the arguments from analogy 
for and against the London Government Bill, and 
to take care that the disgrace which has fallen 
both on New York and Paris by intrusting enor- 
mous responsibilities to corrupt, feeble, and in- 
terested municipal bodies may not attach to 
London which, with its many defects in organ i- 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 119 

sation, is still incomparably the best administered 
of the great cities of the world. 

The municipal administration of New York and 
many of the principal cities is injurious not alone 
for its inefficiency, robbery, and waste. The chief 
evil, and one which, like a cancer, is ever poisoning 
and corroding the yet wholesome body politic, is 
found in its contagious example. Theft and job- 
bery are exalted as virtues which lead to wealth 
and political honour, while honesty and wisdom 
are left to preach at the corners of the streets 
regarded by none. The name of the people, and 
manhood suffrage, and the popular vote, are used 
as veils to screen the shifts and frauds of wire- 
pullers ; and the elected of the people is often no 
more than the corrupt nominee of a dishonest 
clique who laugh at the people, who, now, as ever, 
are willing to be deceived. Corruption accumulates 
on every side ; its slime makes every path slippery 
which politicians tread, till the State Legislature 
and Congress itself become an Augean stable 
which would require a new Hercules to cleanse. 

Americans who love and are proud of their 
country, and who loathe the political system which 
degrades it in the eyes of the world, will not 
consider the picture that I have drawn over- 
coloured. But it is impossible to acquit even the 



I20 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

most honourable among them of the blame which 
attaches to this state of things. Manhood suf- 
frage, untempered by any educational test and 
rendered uncontrollable by the surging mass erf 
emigration, which was a condition unestimated by 
the drafters of the Constitution, is the chief cause 
of the present difficulty, and respectable Americans 
do not see how they can escape from it. Their 
usual reply, when driven into a corner, is that 
although the administration is shamefully corrupt, 
they will be able to reform it whenever they have 
time to do so. At present they are engaged in 
making money as quickly as they can. They 
cannot be troubled with politics ; but when at 
leisure they will reform the administration and 
make it clean and honest. Moreover, the country 
is young, and people, like the English, who have 
passed through the political experiences of the 
Georges, should not be squeamish in criticising 
America, which is undergoing a not more dis- 
creditable process of purification. The double 
fallacy which underlies .this defence is obvious to 
every historical student. In all communities, and 
certainly in America, the honest and respectable 
largely outnumber the disreputable and difjorderly. 
Yet the greatest catastrophes in republics have 
been due to the cowardice and apathy of the 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 121 

former when opposed by the organisation and 
audacity of the latter. The excesses of 1793, 
both in Paris and the provinces, were the work of 
a very small minority, who might have been easily 
overpowered had the nobles and bourgeoisie shown 
the commonest energy and courage. The horrors 
of the Commune were due to a handful of men 
whom the shopkeepers of the Boulevards could 
have driven into the Seine with their yard- 
measures. Safety is never to be secured by 
hesitation and delay, and the longer an abuse re- 
mains unremoved the more difficult is its extirpation. 
The conditions of political life in England during 
the last century and those in America to-day are 
essentially different Here the power was in the 
hands of an educated class, who, as the standard of 
morality became more high, were compelled to 
change their methods or lose power altogether. But, 
in America, manhood suffrage has placed power in 
the hands of the lowest and least educated class, 
a large proportion of whom have little sympathy 
with the country of their adoption and are too 
ignorant to understand its requirements. Educa- 
tion may possibly affect these favourably in the 
future ; but it is also to be considered that the 
present system directly tends, by making dis- 
honesty more profitable than political virtue, to 



122 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

continually aiigmcnt, in an ever-increasing ratio, 
the number of those whose interest it is to per- 
petuate the reign of corruption. Nor can America 
plead youth as an excuse for her moral decrepitude. 
A vicious and depraved youth does not promise a 
healthy manhood or an honourable old age. The 
advantages of her youth were a people unfettered 
by the chains of poverty and prejudice which 
weigh on the races of Europe, and a field free for 
the noblest experiments in government. She 
inherited the experience and culture of the ages ; 
she could profit by their splendid examples and 
avoid the rocks on which they had made ship- 
wreck. She should have advanced and not fallen 
back ; and this was the proud hope of her earliest 
statesmen. The young and vigorous republic of 
the Wert was to revive the classic virtues of Brutus 
and Cincinnatus, and blaze forth, a pillar of fire, to 
guide through the darkness the effete monarchies 
of the Old World. But it would be difficult to 
name any country, except Russia, where the 
Emperor Nicholas declared that he and his son 
were the only people in the country who did not 
steal, and where his successor found that the chief 
peculator of the recent war was his own brother, 
to which the political history of America would 
not be a warning rather than an example. 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 123 

While, in England, there is an intelligent and 
increasing party who advocate the adoption of 
universal suffrage, thoughtful men in America are 
convinced that this very manhood suffrage, unac- 
companied by an educational test, is the chief cause 
of their misfortunes. Mr. Trevelyan, at Galashiels, 
speaking for the Government, recently declared 
that their policy in the extension of the franchise 
had nothing to say as to whether a man were 
Whig or Tory. " We say, if he is a householder, 
// to vote, he should have a vote. We think that 
every intelligent and independent head of a house- 
hold should have an equal voice in directly choosing 
the representatives and indirectly choosing the 
Government of the country." There is probably 
no consistent Liberal who would not accept this 
principle, which applies to Ireland with as much 
force as to England. But it is obvious that the 
condition of fitness is its all-important qualification. 
Mr. Trevelyan's distinguished uncle, in one of his 
splendid sophistries, asserted that to deny men 
freedom until they knew how to make a proper 
use of it was worthy of the fool in the old story 
who would not go into the water until he had 
learned to swim. But men who are unintelligent 
and uneducated ; who have not shown themselves 
possessed of temperance, honesty, and self-restraint, 



124 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

arc virtually infants who have not yet the use of 
their limbs, and whose experiments in the water 
can only end in their destruction. Open wide the 
doors of the franchise to education and intelligence, 
but, with the example of America before us, close 
them in the face of ignorance and crime. 

It is popularly supposed that in no country are 
the advantages of education more widely diffused 
than in the States, and if this were the case, the 
danger which now threatens the Republic from the 
character of those into whose hands political 
power has been placed would not exist. But so 
far as published statistics inform us the reverse is 
the case. A Bill is now before Congress to provide 
Federal aid to education, the schedules of which 
seem to show that the ignorance of the masses is 
exceptionally dense. 

Illiteracy holds the balance of power in fourteen 
Northern and in all the Southern States. In the 
thirty-eight States of the Union there are no less 
than 1,871,217 illiterate voters : only one voter in 
five can write his name, in the Southern States. 
The illiterate voters in South Carolina are more 
than one-half the entire number ; in Alabama, 
Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina and 
Virginia one in two ; while Missouri, with one in 
nine, has the best record. In the Presidential 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 125 

election of 1876, New York, New Hampshire, New 
Jersey, Connecticut, Indiana, California, Nevada, 
Ohio, Oregon, Wisconsin, Illinois, Rhode Island, 
Michigan and Pennsylvania were ranged on the side 
of illiteracy. In the last Presidential contest the 
voters in thirty States, commanding 298 electoral 
votes, were unable to read. In 1876, 60 out of the 
'j^ senators, or four-fifths of the whole, and 259 out 
of 292 representatives in Congress, were in the 
grasp of iUiteracy. In 1880, 58 out of ^6 senators 
and 292 out of 325 representatives were from 
States where the illiterate voters held the balance 
of power. The most superficial knowledge of the 
distribution of the white and coloured population 
will show that these results are not primarily due 
to the almost universal ignorance of the negroes. 
It is so in States like South Carolina, Mississippi 
and Lousiana where they outnumber the whites ; 
and in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Plorida 
and Alabama in which the numbers of the two 
races are almost equal ; but in Connecticut, New 
York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Michigan, 
Ohio and others, the negroes form a very small 
fractional part of the population. At the same 
time, the incapacity of the negro for improvem.ent 
makes the question of the greater fecundity of the 
black race one of extreme interest. Their increase 



126 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

proportionally to the whites is a matter of dispute, 
and Mr. J. H. Tucker, Member of Congress, has 
instituted careful inquiries, extending over the 
period from 1790 to 1880, from which it appears 
that the natural rate of increase of the whites is 
slightly greater than that of the blacks, and while 
the whites were 807 per cent, of the population in 
1790, they were 81-5 per cent, in i860. Including 
immigrants, the white population gained and the 
coloured lost 6 per cent, in the whole period from 
1790 to 1880; while, in the last 20 years, the 
whites have gained i per cent; Texas being the 
only state in which the black population shows an 
increase. The outcome of Mr. Tucker's complete 
survey is that the white race composes 80 per cent, 
of the total population and is steadily gaining, but 
at so slow a rate as to afford no reason for expecting 
any material change in the ratio in the present or 
coming generations. Professor Gilliam, who has 
also made the question a subject of study, arrives 
at very different conclusions. He considers that 
the white population may be expected to double 
itself in 35 years, and the black in 20 years. In 
100 years, this would make the black population 
of the Southern States 192,000,000, while the 
white would be only 96,000,000, and the white 
population of the entire country 336,000,000. 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 



127 



Professor Gilliam further considers that the greater 
fecundity of the negro race is due in a measure to 
the absence of those checks to population which 
exist in all other cases. 

It is true, so far as statistics are reliable, that, 
if a period like the decade between 1S70 and 1880 
be taken, and the States and Territories in which 
there has been an increase be compared with those 
in which there has been a decrease, it will be 
found that, on an assumed basis of ioo,oco whites, 
there has been a gain of 625 to the whites during 
the decade. But it is probable that in the future 
the conditions which affect the white and black 
population will materially change. The propor- 
tion between the two races for the last thirty years 
is shown in the following table : — • 



Year. 


White. 


Coloured. 


1850 
i860 
1870 
1880 


19,553,068 
26,922,537 

33,589,377 
43,404,876 


. 3,638,808 

• 4,441,830 

4,880,000 

6,577,151 

. _ 



These figures would, at first sight, seem to support 
Mr. Tucker's rather than Professor Gilliam's con- 
clusions. The white population has considerably 
more than doubled in the thirty years, while the 
black population has not done so. The most 



128 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

remarkable feature of these figures is the slow 
rate of increase of the negroes between i860 and 
1870, and their rapid increase since the latter 
date, which has nearly overtaken that of the white 
population in spite of the advantage of European 
immigration, which, during the decade, amounted 
to no less than 3,129,384. When the probabilities 
of the future are considered, it appears reasonable 
to assume that the checks on increase, voluntary 
and external, will affect the white rather than 
the coloured portion of the community. The. 
negroes will remain, as at present, uninfluenced 
by those moral and prudential considerations 
which, in educated communities, restrain the in- 
crease of population by d'scouraging early marriage 
or marriage altogether. These considerations will, 
with the white population, have an ever-increasing 
weight as the standard of living becomes higher 
and more luxurious, and the country less able to 
support the population without that struggle for 
existence which is seen in the older countries of 
Europe. While the prudential check will thus 
operate to diminish the ratio of normal increase, 
the same causes will affect the stream of im- 
migration which will slacken and at length cease 
altogether. The race in population will then be 
between a reasonable and highly civilised people 



THE HARVEST OF DEMOCRACY. 129 

restrained from marriage by numerous considera- 
tions of the most complex character, and an ir- 
rational and uncivilised negro community, whom 
no prudential check on population affects, and who 
can live and be happy on the simple elements 
of sunshine and sweet potatoes. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE FOREIGN ELEMENT. 

The Irish question is as burning a one in 
American as in English politics, and I cannot help 
thinking it more hopeless in the States than here, 
from the difficulty of withdrawing concessions 
which have once been made. Mr. Edward O'Brien, 
in reply to a letter of mine in the Times, has in- 
sisted that the most progressive and prosperous 
cities in America — New York, Chicago, and San 
Francisco — are just those in which the population 
of Irish birth and descent is largest in proportion, 
and would have us infer that to this element their 
prosperity is chiefly due. As reasonably might we 
argue that the prosperity of London and Liverpool 
was due to the Irish, who are the poorest and 
most unmanageable part of their population. The 
splendid commercial situation of New York, 



THE FOREIGN ELEMENT. 131 

Chicago, and San Francisco, and the marvellous 
energy of the American population, are the cause 
of their prosperity. It is because they are rich that 
the Irish collect in them. They live almost 
exclusively in the towns, and although in Ireland 
they complain of not possessing land, yet in 
America they will not accept land for cultivation, 
though they may obtain it at a nominal price, or 
for nothing. The majority of the Irish of New 
York differ little from the same class in English 
cities ; they are mostly illiterate, and the secret of 
their power is not in their energy or numbers, but 
that the long and absolute rule of the priests has 
accustomed them to vote solid as they are bid. 
The voters of the city are two hundred and fifty 
thousand, and of these the Irish are probably little 
more than a fifth ; but the determination of their 
leaders, and their own ignorance and political 
ineptitude, enable the disreputable minority to 
triumph over the wealth, culture, and intelligence 
of the disunited majority. No more grotesque 
illustration of the failure of universal suffrage to 
attain the result which alone would justify it could 
possibly be found. The Irish Catholics of America 
are Democrats almost to a man, but this is an 
accident due to a national characteristic which is 
illustrated in the well-known story of the Irishman 

K 2 



132 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

who being asked, on his first landing at New York, 
what were his poHtics, repHed that he knew nothing 
of poHtics, but that he was against the Government. 
The RepubHcans having held office ever since the 
war, the Irish have naturally joined the ranks of 
the opposition. It would be a mistake to imagine 
that political purity prevails where there is no con- 
trolling Irish element. New York has been cited 
as a convenient illustration of the evils of the 
American system. But leave civilisation behind 
and go to the far West, to a new town, like 
Cheyenne, in Wyoming, and every form of 
electoral corruption will be found there rampant, 
and votes sold shamelessly and as openly as sheep 
in the public market. The Irish are far more un- 
popular in America than they are in England ; and 
little sympathy for their grievances is felt or 
expressed ; for the Americans are far too practical 
a race not to rate at their true value the utterances 
of interested demagogues such as O'Donovan 
Rossa and Parnell. The language used in 
Dynamite League meetings in New York, and 
the criminal actions which follow, are alike 
viewed with indignation and disgust by the whole 
American community ; but the weakness of Demo- 
cratic Government is such that the respectable 
majority do not dare to crush or even silence these 



THE FOREIGN ELEMENT. 133 

enemies of the human race, and allow them, without 
molestation, not only to preach and plot arson 
and murder, but to carry them into execution. No 
civilised Government should tolerate for a day the 
open preaching of murder, and America must not 
be surprised if her protection, not of political 
offenders, but of common assassins, results ere 
long in seriously straining her relations with this 
country. 

It is a happy circumstance that the self-com- 
mand and moderation of the English people are 
such that a long series of atrocious outrages has 
failed to arouse any wide-spread hostility to 
Ireland. Englishmen realise that Irish troubles 
are in great part due to the selfish and unworthy 
policy of past years, while it is impossible that the 
Irish should be unpopular when (putting Messieurs 
les assassins aside) there is no more delightful, 
lovable, and quick-witted race in the world. But 
we have not suffered from them as the Americans 
have suffered ; and were London, as is New York, 
in the hands of a gang of Irish adventurers, our 
patience might be tried too sorely. Mr. Parnell 
hopes in the next Parliament to command the 
political situation ; but as his avowed programme 
includes the rejection of allegiance to the Queen 
and dismemberment of the empire, he must not be 



134 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

surprised if both parties unite in temporarily, 
and so far as imperial questions are concerned, 
disfranchising constituencies who return members 
pledged to destroy and degrade the country. 
When the Irish leaders cease to demand what no 
party could grant them without immediate political 
suicide, they will find Englishmen disposed to 
render them full justice, and such a measure of 
local and municipal self-government as prevails in 
England, and is consistent both with imperial 
rights and with the duty of protection, we owe to 
the loyal minority in Ireland. When the time for 
considering this question shall arrive — and it will 
not be until the Irish leaders abandon the open 
profession of treason — the precedent of America, 
both in its war to prevent national disintegration 
and in the virtual independence of each unit of the 
Federal body, will doubtless receive full attention 
from the Liberal Gov^ernment. In the ears of the 
orators of the Opposition, who habitually speak of 
the Irish as of some savage people with whom we 
were at open war, the words compromise and 
concession sound weak and criminal. But when 
History writes the annals of the nineteenth century 
and the voice of passion is still, the policy of the 
Liberal Government towards Ireland, its generosity 
in the presence of ingratitude, its justice and self- 



THE FOREIGN ELEMENT. 135 

possession amidst the fierce storm of party abuse, 
will be held its best title to honour. 

Since the above remarks were written London 
has been startled by the partial destruction of the 
Victoria Railway Station by dynamite, and by 
the synchronous attempt to destroy the stations 
of Charing Cross, Ludgate Hill, and Paddington. 
It has been curious to note the comparative in- 
difference with which these crimes have been 
regarded by the people of London. There has 
been no panic and but little excitement ; while 
it has been generally felt that strong language 
directed against the dynamiters would be as il- 
logical as abuse of wolves engaged in their natural 
occupation of ravaging the sheep-folds. The ex- 
planation is to be partly found in the enormous 
size of London, the districts of which know as 
little of each other as if they were situated in 
different countries. The unit in a body of five 
million persons regards with comparative equa- 
nimity an outrage directed against the entire 
community. The doctrine of chances protects 
him from being blown into the air. But while 
England watches with contempt the efforts of 
the dynamiters to pose as heroes in the eyes of 
the Irish helps of New York, whose wages they 
hope to divert to their own pockets, considerable 



136 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

irritation has been excited by the attitude of 
America. Indeed, the great Republic has never 
cut a more sorry figure ; and its struggles to 
appear impartial, virtuous, and the sacred asylum 
of oppressed patriotism, are rather subjects for 
amusement than anger. The poor rags with which 
the New York Press has striven to cover its 
political nakedness are threadbare indeed. We 
are told that neither municipal nor international 
law meet the supposed exigencies of the case ; 
that the law cannot act against the assassins 
without clear and irrefragable proof in each 
particular case ; that no practical way out of 
the difficulty has been suggested ; that political 
refugees m.ust be protected, however objectionable 
their modes of argument ; that the British Govern- 
ment declined to surrender Orsini, whose case was 
identical with that of the dynamiters, and that 
it would be illogical for England to expect 
America to take action where she had previously 
refused to move. It is possible that the American 
Government may be less timid than the Press, 
and may find sufficient courage to defy the Irish 
vote, and insist that those who live beneath its 
flag and claim its protection shall refrain from 
the open preaching and practice of murder — but 
a Presidential election is at hand, and those who 



THE FOREIGN ELEMENT. 137 

know America best expect least from its govern- 
ment. The Alabama precedent, in accordance 
with which the Enghsh paid extravagant com- 
pensation for damage inflicted on American 
commerce by ships of war which had been 
allowed to arm in British ports, is, naturally, 
declared in the States to be inapplicable. But 
the nature of arbitration would not allow the 
Americans to be themselves the judges of this 
question ; and an impartial umpire, whether it 
were France, or Brazil, or Germany, might hold 
that the Government which allowed public sub- 
scriptions for murder and outrage ; which saw 
the assassins arrange their crimes, and glory, in 
the face of the world, in their perpetration, was 
fully as liable to be called upon for the amplest 
compensation as was the British Government, 
which, in a careless moment, and uncertain of the 
power of its municipal law, allowed the Alabama 
to leave its shores. There is no real doubt as 
to the identity of the assassins. If a dozen men, 
such as John Devoy, of the IrisJi Nation ; Patrick 
Ford, editor of the Irish World; P. J. Sheridan, 
the friend of Mr. Parnell, and connected with 
the same paper; O'Donovan Rossa and Patrick 
Joyce of the United Irishmen were arrested and 
sent to prison in default of sufficient guarantees 



138 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

of future good behaviour, no great injustice would 
be done. But so long as the annoyance and 
danger affect England alone, America does not 
take the trouble to move. The day will come 
when American men and women and children 
will suffer from the dynamiters' activity. Then 
Judge Lynch, whose methods Englishmen refuse to 
follow, will have an interview with these New 
York editors, ending with a short shrift and the 
nearest telegraph pole. 

The difficulties and dangers which necessarily 
accompany manhood suffrage are, in America, 
intensified by the enormous emigration and the 
law of naturalisation under which aliens are 
admitted as citizens after five years' residence. 
The consequence of this provision, which, as in 
the case of Michael Mulhooly, is frequently 
evaded, is that a large number of persons are 
annually admitted to all the rights of citizenship 
before they have become American in sympathy 
or sentiment, with the tendency to form separate 
political groups looking only to the interests of 
their own class or nationality. Thus a number 
of imperia in iniperio grow up, German, Scandi- 
navian, or Irish, bringing, as we have seen with 
the last-named, confusion into the Federal Govern- 
ment, and fighting from beneath its shield against 



THE FOREIGN ELEMENT. 139 

their private enemies. The Germans, in America 
as elsewhere, are a sober, honest, and intelligent 
body, and have brought the land of their adoption 
its most valuable contingent. But they are rather 
in than of the American world. They do not 
intermarry with Americans ; they have their 
separate societies and amusements ; and as they 
now number some ten millions, there will at no 
distant date be a larger German population in 
America than in Europe, whose sympathies must 
more or less affect European politics. To a less 
degree these remarks apply to the Scandinavian 
emigrants, who, in States like Minnesota, are 
numerous. They have in no way changed their 
nationality with their climate, and the Swedish 
charge d'affaires at Washington told me that 
they were continually referring to him in their 
difficulties instead of to the authorities of their 
State. 

Difficulties such as these may be successfully 
solved ; but there is one legacy of the war, in the 
negro vote, which will only become more in- 
tolerable by the lapse of time, for the reason 
that the African race is extremely prolific, 
and, under existing conditions, may be expected 
to increase more rapidly than any other element 
of the heterogeneous mass of American citizens. 



I40 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

The position of the negro is anomalous and 
embarrassing. Without referring to the multipHed 
researches of the Anthropological Society on the 
capacity of the African races, it may generally be 
asserted that the negro is as fit for the franchise 
as the monkey he closely resembles. He has one 
or two good qualities and many bad ones. He 
makes a very good waiter if in firm hands, but 
is usually spoilt by American familiarity, which 
in his small mind breeds contempt, so that the 
head waiter at a restaurant give himself more 
airs than an English duke. For any occupation 
requiring higher intellectual powers than blacking 
boots or waiting at table the vast majority of 
negroes are unfit. A few of the best struggle 
into the professions and there fail, though I 
remember at Washington some cases of partial 
success ; while one coloured female lawyer of much 
vivacity roundly declared, during the recent civil 
rights discussion, that the negroes were the 
superior race in America. Since the war they 
have largely increased, and now number some 
six millions of uneducated and unimprovable 
persons, as useless for the purposes of civilisation 
as if they were still wandering naked through the 
African jungle. Slavery is an accursed thing, 
but it is rather as degrading the higher race of 



THE FOREIGN ELEMENT. 141 

slaveholders than as brutalising the slaves that 
it must be condemned. There is no more natural 
equality among races than individuals, and im- 
perial peoples have to use up some of the weaker 
and poorer in their political manufactories. The 
Nemesis of slavery was not exhausted in the civil 
war. Its evil fruits are still to be gathered by 
the American people, who have in their midst 
this ever-growing mass of savagery which they 
hate and despise, and to which they were com- 
pelled to give the rights of citizenship. For 
although it sounds well to speak of the war as 
the protest of the North against slavery, the 
emancipation of the slaves was never intended by 
the Americans. They then cared for the negroes 
no more than now, when they would be delighted 
to carry the whole race to the middle of the 
Atlantic and sink them there. The North was 
driven into war, much against its will, by the 
threats, the insults, and the hostile acts of the 
South. Abraham Lincoln, in his inaugural address 
as President, repeated and emphasised his former 
declaration that " he had no purpose, directly or 
indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery 
in the States where it existed." And when the 
war was over and the victory won, he was far too 
shrewd to desire to admit the negroes to the 



142 THE GREAT RErUBLIC. 

franchise. This fatal measure was taken in sheer 
self-defence to swamp the Southern vote, which 
would otherwise have restored the intolerable 
situation previous to the war. Since that day 
the miserable negro has been the tool and sport 
of every party ; now petted, now kicked ; his 
strong limbs and feeble brain at the service of 
any demagogue who might best know how to 
tickle his vanity and arouse his passions. If he 
were other than himself he would be a fit object 
for compassion ; but he is of too low a type to 
be unhappy, and is probably the only man who 
laughs to-day in America. 



CHAPTER IX. 

JUSTICE. 

The administration of justice in the States, on 
which I have already incidentally remarked, den:iands 
some further notice, for it contains the surest test 
of the measure of freedom enjoyed by a nation. 
However debased may be the standard of popular 
morality, and however low the ideal of national 
duty, that people is still free among whom the 
judgment seat is pure and unaffected alike by the 
passion of the mob or the influence of the 
Government. But, however bravely a people may 
flaunt its national flag, it is not yet free or has 
ceased to be so when its judges prostitute their 
sacred functions ; when they are the hired servants 
of corrupt and infamous adventurers ; when juries 
are bought and sold ; where the poor are condemned 
and the rich are criminal with impunity ; and 
when the outraged people have their ultimate and 



144 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

only refuge from the infamy of the Courts in 
those parodies of justice which, under the name of 
Lynch Law, arc as much the disgrace of x'\merica 
as the outward sign of its moral decrepitude. 
That this is the condition of the administration 
of what is termed justice in many of the States 
it is impossible to doubt, or that it has accom- 
panied a general depreciation in the standard 
of public virtue. The contemporary press pro- 
claims it daily in a thousand newspapers, and 
novelists and essayists are equally frank. Mr. 
Grant White, who, while an untrustworthy witness 
on English manners is both a competent and 
courageous one with regard to America, writes as 
follows : — 

" The deterioration in morals is so certain and so well-known 
that no one thinks of disputing it. To look through a file of 
one of our leading newspapers for the last fifteen years is to 
be led to the conclusion that personal honesty has become the 
rarest of virtues in the United States, except public probity, 
which seems no longer to exist. The very ruins of it have 
disappeared. Our State legislators, instead of being com- 
posed of men to whom their constituents looked up, are now 
composed of men upon whom their constituents look down — 
not second-rate, nor even third-rate, but fourth- and fifth-rate 
men, sordid in morals and vulgar in manners, who do politics 
as a business, for the mere purpose of filhng their own 
pockets. No one thinks of disputing this more than the 
presence of the blood-sucking insects of summer. Congress 
itself is openly declared by our own journals to be, because 



JUSTICE. 145 

it is known to be, the most corrupt body in civilised Chris- 
tendom. Within the last fifteen years we have seen men 
occupying the highest positions in the Government of the 
United States, who were not only purchasable, but who had 
been purchased, and at a very small price. I know what I 
say, and mean it. The Cabinets, during the same period, 
have been so rotten with corruption that the presence in 
them of two or three men of integrity could not save them . 
Worse even than this, judges are openly called Mr. This-one's 
judge or Mr. That-one's ; their owner being generally the 
controlling stockholder and manager of some great corpora- 
tion which coins wealth for him and his satellites by schemes 
of gigantic extortion." 

The protest of the American people against this 
prostitution of justice is Lynch law, which many 
apologists have attempted to justify on the ground 
that in new communities, and especially in those 
which have attracted, in mining districts, an ex- 
ceptionally brutal, lawless and dangerous class of 
settlers, the more respectable portion of the com- 
munity is compelled, in self-defence, and to maintain 
those elementary principles of society without which 
an assembly of men is no better than a pack of 
wolves, to arm themselves with the powers which the 
law is unable to wield, and punish offenders sum- 
marily and severely. This justification is sufficient, 
and indeed complete so far as those communities are 
concerned the conditions of which are so primitive 
that the law is necessarily silent and the social 
instinct of self-preservation takes its place. But a 

L 



146 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

traveller may go far in America to find circum- 
stances such as these. Perhaps in towns like 
Austin and San Antonio, on the very borderland 
of civilisation, lynching may still be a necessary 
evil : but in the rudest mining districts of the 
Rocky Mountains I have found the general popu- 
lation as orderly as elsewhere. No doubt if 
curiosity or amusement take the traveller into 
gambling saloons at midnight in Silverton or 
Leadville he will do well to avoid giving offence to 
his rough companions ; but the average miner is a 
pleasant fellow enough, and there are many quarters 
of London, Paris or New York more dangerous to 
a well-dressed stranger than the wildest mining- 
town in the Western States. Nor is lynching at all 
confined to such districts. Few days pass without 
the newspapers recording lynchlngs in Southern or 
Western States, generally with indifference, often 
with approval. In October last, within two or 
three days, I noted several such cases which 
attracted no particular attention. In one, in 
North Carolina, a negro, in a quarrel with a white 
man named Redmond, shot him dead. Campbell, 
the negro, was arrested. The same night a band of 
thirty masked men took him from the jail and 
hanged him to a tree, doing their work so quickly, 
and it may be supposed so entirely with the 



JUSTICE. 147 

connivance and consent of the jail officials, that 
the occurrence was not known till Campbell's body 
was found dangling from the tree at daylight. 
"Everything" (says naively the local newspaper) 
" is quiet now." A day or two before, what 
the journals call "an effective but unusual 
punishment" was inflicted upon a negro of the 
name of Lewis Wood, who had been convicted 
of outraging a young coloured girl. The mob 
waited at the Edgerly station for the train 
conveying the prisoner, dragged him a short 
distance from the line, chained him to a tree, 
covered him with pine knots and chips, and burnt 
him to death. About the same day at Lafayette, 
Indiana, an old man named Jacob Nell, who had 
confessed to the murder of a young girl, Ada 
Atkinson, was with difficulty sayed from the mob. 
The crime seemed to me so motiveless that, in 
England, a verdict of acquittal on the ground of 
insanity would have been probably given : but the 
mob were excited and demanded blood. The 
local paper observed calmly that the mob appearing 
to have no leader, " it was probable that the law 
would be allowed to take its course." Whether 
the old maniac was torn to pieces or hung I cannot 
say. I did not follow his fortunes further. Such 
cases are too common in America to excite more 

L 2 



148 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

than a passing interest. The inveterate dislike to 
the negro on the part of the white population in the 
Southern States is shown very clearly in these out- 
rages. The assault or the manslaughter committed 
by a white man is often passed over altogether by 
the community. The unfortunate negro, whose 
passions are strong and uncontrolled by education 
or self-respect, has no such immunity, and is ruth- 
lessly stnmg up by Judge Lynch, or sometimes, 
as we have seen, burnt alive. 

As these lines are passing through the press, I 
notice in the American telegraphic intelligence the 
following announcement : — " A negro who had 
brutally murdered a woman near Austin, Texas, 
was chased and captured. He was taken to the 
scene of the crime by a lynching party of one 
hundred, and confessed his guilt. He was then 
roasted to death/' The confession extorted under 
such circumstances was probably worth neither 
more nor less than those wrung from the victims of 
the Inquisition previous to an aiito-da-fe. 

"It will be noticed,'' writes the New York T?'ibune, "that 
the privilege of becoming furious because one of their race 
has been killed by one of the other is strictly reserved to the 
whites. The negroes are expected to be serene, if not grateful, 
when negroes are killed by whites." 

The conviction of eight *^sturdy farmer boys" 

in Georg-ia for outrages on neg^roes was received with 



JUSTICE. 149 

general surprise, the more so when it appeared that 

a majority of the jury was composed of whites, it 

having been found impossible to punish such 

offences which were justified by the sentiment of 

the white community, and verdicts of acquittal were 

always returned. The evidence in this case showed 

that the prisoners had whipped, shot, and otherwise 

maltreated negroes who had voted for Mr. Speer, 

the independent Democratic candidate for Congress. 

One negro swore to having received one hundred 

and seventy -five lashes, on the ground that he was 

a *' d d Speer negro," besides being struck with 

steel knuckles, kicked, and threatened with death. 

Another had been shot in three places. The 

defence was a general alibi, but the witnesses 

positively identified several of the defendants ; and 

the secret of the verdict probably was that the 

evidence was too strong to be safely disregarded 

by even a sympathising jury. 

The following incident, which occurred in August 

last in the same State, will show the manner in 

which the negro can be treated by " a member of 

a good family " : — 

" While Mrs. George W. Feks was shaking fruit from a 
tree, Peter Broomfield, coloured, asked her to be careful that 
she did not break off any branches. Mrs. Felts lost her 
temper and complained to her husband of what Broomfield 
had said. Yesterday, while the latter was at work roofing a 



ISO THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

house, in company with three other men, Felts appeared at 
the foot of tlie ladder with a double-barrelled shotgun. Broom- 
field comprehended the situation and pleaded for mercy. 
Felts said, ' If you will come down and let me flog you, that 
will be the end of it ; if you don't I will kill you.' Broomfield's 
terrified companions urged him to take the flogging and save 
his life. As Broomfield commenced a descent of the ladder, 
Felts, without saying a word, fired both barrels of the gun 
and two balls from a revolver into the coloured man's body, 
and he fell to the ground a corpse. Felts then walked to 
where the body lay, and with an oath fired three bullets from 
his pistol into the dead man's breast. Then, turning to the 
terrified spectators. Felts said, ' There, I guess that fixed 
him ! ' and walked away, since which he has not been seen. 
The negroes are greatly excited, and say if they can capture 
Felts they will burn him alive in the woods. Felts is twenty- 
seven years old and a member of a good family." 

If it should be said that from an outrage such as 
this, committed by a passionate man, no argument 
can be drawn, I would only reply that the incident 
may be taken for what it is worth, and derives its 
only significance from the general surprise with 
which the Ku-Klux convictions above referred to 
were received. 

The EcJio, which is the greatest admirer of 
American institutions in the London press, and 
which has criticised my opinions of the Harvest of 
Democracy with some asperity, lately observed in 
its leading columns that it was remarkable that 
American public opinion seldom made a mistake 
in its judgment of a criminal, whatever the courts 



JUSTICE. 151 

might do, and that there was no case on record of 
a man having been lynched on evidence that would 
not have procured his conviction in any well- 
constituted and honest court. A more laughable 
statement was surely never framed. It is 
obviously impossible to be certain of the guilt of 
a man who has been hanged or burnt alive before 
trial. It is as obviously unreasonable, to insist on 
the guilt of an unfortunate who has been lynched 
after an acquittal in open court. Yet such cases 
form a considerable proportion of these outrages. 
Nor do the Americans themselves adopt the 
illogical view of their English apologist. The 
Century of April last writes as follows : — 

" It cannot be too often nor too strongly proclaimed that 
these lynchings themselves are crimes ; that they are utterly 
without excuse ; that they furnish a remedy which is worse 
than the disease. When a score of men can find no better way 
of expressing their detestation of murder than by becoming 
murderers themselves, our civilisation seems to have reduced 
itself to an absurdity. Moreover, lynch law is not much more 
accurate in its measurement and dispensation of justice than 
the lax administration against which it protests. The mob 
is neither judicial nor chivalrous ; the weak and defenceless 
are far more likely to suffer at its hands than the strong and 
prosperous, as is shown by the fact that the victims of more 
than half the lynchings reported last year were Southern 
negroes. 

" Nevertheless, the failure of criminal justice, which makes 
room for mobs and lynching, is a greater disgrace than the 
savagery of the mobs. The fact that thirteen out of fourteen 



152 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

murderers escape the gallows is the one damning fact that 
blackens the record of our criminal jurisprudence. No 
American ought to indulge in any boasting about his native 
land, while the evidence remains that the laws made for the 
protection of human life are thus shamelessly trampled under 
foot. No occupant of the bench and no member of the bar 
ought to rest until those monstrous abuses which result in the 
utter defeat of justice are thoroughly corrected." 



The statistics of criminal justice in the States to 
which the Century refers show that, during- the year 
1882, twelve hundred and sixty-six murders were 
reported ; and in 1883, no less than fifteen hundred 
and seventeen — a proportion three times as large as 
in England, and nearly double that of those Euro- 
pean countries where crimes of violence are most 
common and least regarded. Against this black 
record there stand only ninety-three legal execu- 
tions ; so that the deterrent influence of the death 
penalty, where only one murderer in fifteen meets 
his deserts, can hardly be considered very 
great. Where the law has thus grievously and 
conspicuously failed, the wild and blind passion of 
the mob has pretended .to supply its deficiencies, 
and the same year records no less than one hundred 
and eighteen lynchings. 

The weakness of the law and its corrupt and 
inefficient administration are the direct cause of 
this state of things. But, as the Century truly 



JUSTICE. 153 

observes, the remedy is worse than the disease. 
Justice is brought into contempt both by the 
usurpation of its functions by the mob and by its 
own cowardice and venaHty. How many persons, 
it might reasonably be asked, were judicially 
punished during the year 1883 for their participa- 
tion in these 118 mob murders. It is notorious 
that the law is ordinarily powerless to punish such 
outrages ; while it is equally certain that their effect 
upon the people is of the most demoralising kind. 

Last September I was in Cheyenne, Wyoming, 
a day or two after a lynching had occurred, and I 
inquired into its circumstances from some of the 
townsmen who had assisted at the ceremony. So 
far as I remember, the victim was accused of having 
murdered a man whom he had met camping in the 
prairie, who had invited him to share his meal, and 
whom, when sleeping, he killed and robbed. The 
crime was an atrocious one, though whether the 
accused were guilty can be never known, for, having 
been arrested, he was lodged in the lockup, whence 
the good citizens, fearing that he might escape 
punishment, through the uncertainty of the law, 
incontinently took him, without any resistance on 
the part of the officials, and hanged him to a 
telegraph pole in the principal street. One of my 
informants was a young man employed in a large 



154 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

dry-goods store, who assured me that, although 
he took his gun, he only attended the execution in 
the character of a spectator. The self-constituted 
judges and executioners were, he said, the most 
respectable inhabitants of the town, shopkeepers 
and merchants. The hangman was a telephone 
clerk, and as, mounted on a ladder, he drew the 
rope, already round the victim's neck, to the top 
of the pole, he put the end to his ear and shouted 
" Hullo," in telephonic fashion, attracting the 
attention of the person at the other end of the 
line. This brutal witticism was received with great 
laughter by the crowd, though it may have been 
less appreciated by the condemned, who was 
straightway launched into eternity. No one of 
the Cheyenne people to whom I spoke seemed in 
any way ashamed of the occurrence. The mur- 
derer, they said, would have escaped punishment 
if he had been sent for trial, and their procedure, if 
less regular, was more certain and just than that 
of the courts. Now we may allow, for the sake of 
argument, that this hanged man was guilty, though 
of this there can exist no legal proof ; and, further, 
that his execution was due to the fear that, if 
regularly tried, he would escape proper punish- 
ment. Yet to a person who has been privileged to 
live in a civilised country, where the passions of 



JUSTICE. 155 

the mob are held in control by the firm and 
impartial administration of the law, the respectable 
citizens of Cheyenne, which is a wealthy, prosperous 
town, with churches, banks, hotels, and daily news- 
papers, seem little removed from savages. If the 
people of Wyoming or any other State desire a 
pure administration of justice, they can obtain it. 
The remedy is in their own hands. The judges 
are not appointed by the Government, but elected 
by themselves: the juries who acquit murderers 
are their own friends and comrades, and the 
defeat of justice is due to their own low standard 
of public morality. 

If an illustration, on a larger scale, of the mal- 
administration of justice and the demoralisation 
which results from the practice of lynching be 
required, the recent riots at Cincinnati furnish it. 
The details are too notorious to need lengthy 
repetition. Suffice it to say that a sentence of 
twenty years' imprisonment having been passed on 
a young man named Berner for the murder and 
robbery of his employer, general indignation was 
excited in the town. The people had long com- 
plained that murderers were habitually acquitted, 
admitted to bail, or sentenced to inadequate terms 
of imprisonment, and they believed that any 
criminal might escape whose friends were in a 



156 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

position to fee unscrupulous lawyers to bribe 
equally unscrupulous juries. A mass meeting was 
held, which, speedily losing self-control, started 
for the jail with the declared intention of lynching 
the murderers confined there. The attack on the 
building was repulsed by the police and militia, 
with a loss to the mob of some sixty-five killed and 
wounded. The excitement continually rose higher : 
for two days the fighting lasted. Troops were 
poured into the town, and a Gatling gun was used 
with terrible effect on the rioters. At the conclusion 
of the affray, some two hundred were killed and 
wounded, and the Court House, which had cost a 
quarter of a million of dollars, was in ashes. Some 
four thousand soldiers were encamped in the streets, 
and Cincinnati resembled a city taken by assault. 

I can imagine a simple German emigrant, on his 
arrival in New York, reading the dark story of the 
Cincinnati riots with a feeling akin to stupefaction. 
Was it then for this that he had left Bismarck and 
the tyranny of the Old World behind ? Was this 
the America of his dreams, where the rich were 
beneficent, the poor content, and where every free- 
man enjoyed his ov/n in honourable independence ? 
Instead of the paradise he had imagined, he found 
a pandemonium, with the people in revolt against 
the law ; the troops mowing down the mob with 



JUSTICE. 157 

machine guns, and Liberty, her eyes ahght with 
unlioly passions and her shining garments all be- 
smirched with blood, hounding on her worshippers 
to arson, pillage, and murder. How could the 
simple Teuton understand that this was the result 
of government of the people for the people, or that 
the American judge would not only, like Pilate, 
have condemned the blameless victim and released 
Barabbas, but, with a deeper infamy, would have 
divided with Judas the price of blood ? 

If we could believe that the Cincinnati riots 
signified no more than a genuine protest of respect- 
able citizens against the systematic prostitution of 
justice, the friends of America and of freedom 
might regard them with equanimity, if not approval. 
Desperate diseases need desperate remedies, and in 
politics, as in war, omelettes are not to be made 
without breaking eggs. But I do not believe that 
this view of the case would be correct. The riots 
of Cincinnati were less due to the indignation of 
the people at any inadequate sentence — for, in every 
country, such failures of justice are common from 
the tenderness of the judge or the humanitarian 
sentiment of the jury, than to the general demorali- 
sation of the popular conscience due to the habitual 
and unpunished practice of extra-judicial murder 
under the nam.e of lynch law. To the mob a 



158 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

lynching has all the savage delight and attraction 
which Imperial Rome found in gladiatorial exhibi- 
tions. The murder which caused this particular 
outbreak was by no means an atrocious one, and 
was brought home to the murderer by his voluntary 
surrender and confession. It was punished by a 
sentence of twenty years' imprisonment, only less 
severe than death, and by many would be held to 
be far worse than the death penalty. But a certain 
number of citizens were determined that their 
opinion of the appropriate punishment should, 
according to Judge Lynch's arbitrary procedure, 
over-ride the decision of the court ; and they were 
surprised and indignant that the jail officials did 
not fail in their duty and surrender the destined 
victims after the usual and decent amount of coy 
resistance. The passions of the mob were soon 
aroused : the tiger^had tasted blood ; and the pre- 
tended purifiers of the judgment seat were speedily 
reinforced by the large contingent of brutality and 
crime which is to be found in the slums of every 
considerable city. The contest was then between 
order and anarchy ; and the troops were as justified 
in firing on the rioters as was the Republican 
Government of France in suppressing the Commune 
in a similar manner. The character of the riot is 
clearly shown in the savage attack made by the 



JUSTICE. ,59 

mob on the men engaged in extinguishing the fire 
in a shop which was being pillaged, one fireman 
being killed and several wounded. What does 
American Liberty say to these poor victims, 
wounded and slain by their fellow-citizens while 
discharging a dangerous and honourable duty ? 
This is not the blood which cements the altar of 
Freedom, but rather that with which African 
savages besmear their cruel idols. If there be a 
page in human history which, more than another 
might give occasion for sorrow to angels and 
laughter to devils, it is surely the story of the 
Cincinnati riots. 

Although lynch law, both in the inequity of its 
procedure and in the moral lassitude which it 
induces, is the most startling symptom of judicial 
maladministration, there are many concurrent signs 
of the decadence of the respect due to law and of 
the paralysis of its healthy action. The criminal 
law is as little respected as feared, and, out of the 
morbid sentimentalism of judges and juries and 
the love of excitement in the people, who are dis- 
posed to consider every one a hero who can suffi- 
ciently amuse them, has arisen a race of lawyers 
and experts who can prolong a trial till a jury 
acquits because it has forgotten the evidence, and 
who can successfully maintain that the most cold- 



l6o THE GRKAT REPUBLIC. 

blooded and deliberate murder was but the result 
of a pardonable hallucination. English procedure 
can show many lengthy trials, and the famous 
Tichbornc case was discreditable to our courts ; 
but the point in dispute was obscure and of ab- 
sorbing interest ; while the outrageous conduct of 
the counsel for the defence was universally repro- 
bated by the profession to which he belonged. But 
we have nothing to compare with the scandal of the 
Star Route case, the second trial of which lasted 
six months, and ended in a gross miscarriage of 
justice ; or the indecency of the Guiteau case, where 
the assassin of the President was permitted, for 
months, to browbeat and insult judges and counsel 
alike, while his blasphemy and insolence were 
applauded by a public as noisy and disrespectful 
as the gallery of a suburban theatre. The com- 
ments of the Neiv York Herald on the Cincinnati 
riots are significant enough : 

" What with facile coroners and criminal authorities who 
are chosen for political reasons and obey the nod of a boss, 
and the plea of insanity and all the dilatory processes of the 
land, the murderer who gets hanged at last is an unusually 
unlucky mortal. But while we do not see any probability 
that our citizens are likely to try the Cincinnati remedy 
against this evil, yet if they should be disposed that way, 
they may well remember the troublesome elements that 
smoulder just beneath the peaceful surface of city life. We 
have a society here that meets every Sunday night to hear 



JUSTICE. i6i 

speeches in favour of universal murder with dynamite. We 
have a colony of the men who tried to burn the city of Paris. 
We have Most and Schwab and an army of their adherents. 
We have perhaps a hundred thousand men who would con- 
template the burning of this city as a noble sacrifice on the 
altar of their principles." 

No critic of American institutions can, with 
justice cr honesty, refuse to make the fullest allow- 
ance for the heterogeneity of the American popu- 
lation, and the enormous difficulties caused by the 
swarm of immigrants wdio pour into New York at 
the rate of a thousand a day from every part of 
Europe. But in drawing from American difficulties 
the lesson for English guidance, we cannot forget 
that the root of the evil lies in universal suffrage, 
untempered by any educational or moral checks, 
and in opening the ballot to all but the Chinese 
(who would probably vote far more reasonably 
than a large number of more favoured citizens), 
thus taking the power from those who could use 
it aright, and intrusting it to those who have no 
knowledge to use it wisely, even had they the wish 
to do so. The law then becomes, as we have seen, 
the accomplice of the criminal ; and the orderly 
majority are thrust into the position so abhorrent 
to a civilised community, of holding their own by 
force of arms. Nothing can be more hardening to 
the national conscience than this attitude. An 

M 



i62 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

American friend, writing to me from New York on 
the subject of the low Irish in that city, says : — 

"They are clamorous and noisy, and, like O'Donovan 
Rossa, make a great noise to convince people of what they 
call their power. When they become lawless, however, we 
shoot them down, and shall continue to do so." 

Drastic remedies such as these, inevitable as 
they may be, are not to be prescribed with a light 
heart. They seem to signify the negation of law ; 
and the more prosaic procedure of the English 
courts, even when administering the odious neces- 
sity of a Coercion Act, is more in accord with 
nineteenth-century civilisation. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE COST OF DEMOCRACY. 

The cheapness of democratic institutions is the 
ground on which they have been most frequently 
recommended to popular approval. Demagogues 
have pointed the attention of the mob to the long 
Civil Lists of princes, and to the pensions and fat 
offices which a privileged aristocracy have divided 
among their order ; and have contrasted this 
system of jobbery with the chaste republican 
simplicity which, instead of the imperial ermine, is 
content to be clothed with virtue and public spirit. 
It is then necessary to examine these high pre- 
tensions. History is full of the extravagance of 
Courts, and in no country more than our own has 
titled incompetence drained the public purse, and 
brought confusion on our policy at home and 
abroad. Would the adoption of republicanism 
abolish these evils, which, in a purer atmosphere, 

M 2 



i64 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

and in the light of a fuller publicity, have grown 
daily less conspicuous ? 

In France the new Republic has cost twice as 
much as the Empire ; and the expenditure shows 
no sign of having reached its highest point. But 
it is not possible here to examine the statistics of 
the French Republic, and we will be content with 
a few^ of those connected with military and naval 
administration in the United States. First, it is 
necessary to understand the duties which are 
expected of the American army. Its services are 
not likely to be required against a foreign enemy, 
and it is thus maintained for home service in such 
numbers and efficiency as may enable it to preserve 
ordei- in any exceptional emergencies, such as the 
riots of Cincinnati or Pittsburg, to guard the 
Mexican frontier, and to restrain the raids of 
Indian tribes. The last duty is that upon which 
it is mostly engaged, and a most unsatisfactory 
duty it is. The world may judge of the value 
which a republic sets on liberty when it studies 
the treatment of the negroes before the war, and 
the Indians to-day, at the hands of the people 
and Government of the United States. If all the 
Indian tribes — men, women, and children through- 
out the States and Territories — be enumerated they 
amount to some 66,000 souls, the population of a 



THE COST OF DEMOCRACY. ^65 

second-rate town. Yet a long series of Indian 
outrages and reprisals have and are taking place, 
which a nation of 50,000,000 does not disdain to 
call ** Indian wars/' The true origin of the 
disputes is in the weakness of the executive and 
the popular contempt for the law. The squatters 
and settlers of the West look upon the Indians as 
" vermin," to be exterminated as speedily as 
possible. The miserable savages have no refuge 
save in the generosity and justice of the Govern- 
ment, which has set apart for their especial use 
and benefit reservations within which no white 
settlements are permitted. But they are harassed 
and persecuted on every side ; their undoubted 
rights are disallowed or confiscated, and corrupt 
place-hunters, ignorant of their language and 
customs, are appointed to superintend their delicate 
relations with their white neighbours. Only the 
other day one of these officials, Mr. Commissioner 
Price, took upon himself to abolish polygamy. 
The usage was universal and immemorial in all 
the tribes, but did not commend itself to the 
enlightened views of Mr. Price, who not only 
proposed to forbid it in the future, but to insist 
upon all those Indians who had two or more 
wives summarily discarding all but the one he 
considered permissible. As I have not heard of 



i66 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

a new "Indian war" I presume that Mr. Price 
has been extinguished by some superior official 
possessed of more intelligence ; but the incident, 
extraordinary as it may appear, is a fair illustration 
of the policy of the Indian Bureau. It is im- 
possible not to sympathise with the sentiment 
of disgust and contempt with which the shrewd, 
hard-working Yankee regards the dirty, lazy, and 
irreclaimable sava2["e whose lands and hunting- 
grounds he considers his lawful spoil. The Indian 
of romance, as drawn by Fenimore Cooper, who 
seems in life and manners to have been as much 
of a savage as his favourite models, is hardly 
recognisable in the squalid and repulsive outcasts 
one meets in New Mexico and other by-paths of 
American civilisation. The Indian refuses to work 
in any way or for any consideration, and subsists 
on the chase and on the weekly dole of flour 
which he is by no means too proud to accept from 
the Government. If he cannot dig, to beg he is 
by no means ashamed. It is obvious that the 
sooner he dies out and makes room for more 
useful persons the better ; yet this does not, from 
an administrative point of view, excuse the 
Government for the unworthy and dishonest policy 
which they have permitted towards those who are 
so few and weak that they should not look to the 



THE COST OF DEMOCRACY. 167 

authorities for protection in vain. In British 
India there are many aboriginal races, like Bhils 
and Gonds, who are of no account as a source of 
revenue or strength, yet the Government takes 
fully as much care of their interests as if they 
were a rich and civilised community. In Canada, 
where the Indians are numerous, we have no 
record of constant Indian wars, and the white and 
coloured races live side by side orderly and peace- 
fully. The difference is due to the care with 
which complaints are investigated and grievances 
redressed, while Indian affairs are conducted by 
officials who understand the business, instead of 
by the first adventurer who can bribe the wire- 
pullers of Washington to give him office. 

Although the duties to be performed by the 
United States army are few, and would be 
nominal were the Indian Bureau administered 
with ordinary honesty and discretion, it must not 
be imagined that its cost is at all proportional to 
its work or numbers. In 1881, the war ex- 
penditure, in a time of profound peace, was 
'$40, 500,000 ; and the number of regular 
troops was 20,000. For ij larger expenditure, 
Germany maintains, on a peace footing, 419,659 
men: for an expenditure i^ greater, France 
maintains 470,600 men, and England, whose 



i68 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

military expenditure is, from obvious reasons, 
exceptionally heavy, for | greater expenditure 
maintains (exclusive of India) 133,720 men. 

For Englishmen, and especially for those who 
look ignorantly and blindly across the Atlantic to 
the great Republic of the West, and who, in their 
simplicity, imagine that the adoption of republican 
institutions would make the burthen of life in 
England less heavy, there can be no more whole- 
some course of study than the financial statistics of 
the United States during the present century. I 
will attempt, most briefly, to explain their general 
features so far as military and naval expenditure is 
concerned, in order that the cost of democracy may 
be fairly realised. 

The year 1801 found the young Republic at 
peace, under the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson. 
The strength of the regular army, as fixed by 
Congress, was 5,144, and the cost 81,672,000. The 
expenditure declined for some years, and the war 
with England then raised it to an average of 
$16,000,000 during the years 1812 to 1816. It fell 
to one half of this the following year ; to $2,500,000 
in 1820; and fluctuated from i?3, 000,000 to 
16,000,000 until the year 1836, when it suddenly 
rose to 812,000,000, at which point it remained till 
1839, when stringent and successful efforts atreduc- 



THE COST OF DEMOCRACY. 169 

tion were made, expenditure falling to f 9,000,000 in 
1839, and to $3,000,000 in 1843. With the year 
1845, the first and economical period of war ex- 
penditure ceased for America ; and the second 
phase commenced with war with Mexico and the 
annexation of Texas, and an annual expenditure 
which between 1846 to i860 averaged $17,000,000. 
The period 1862 to 1866 must be excluded from 
the calculation, as the enormous cost of the civil 
war would make the statistics of normal expendi- 
ture valueless. 

In 1867, the mihtary expenditure on peace estab- 
hshments was $95,250,000, and it was not till 1871 
that the effect of the war no longer appeared 
directly in the estimates. The charges were 
then some 835,750,000, and they have averaged 
$40,000,000 during the present decade. 

The naval expenditure must now be considered. 
This, in 1801, was considerably larger than that on 
the army, and amounted to $2,111,424. It was, 
however, kept below this sum until 18 1 2, when 
war bein^ declared with Great Britain, the cost of 
the navy at once doubled. But at no period of the 
war, in which the American navy was most dis- 
tinguished for gallantry and enterprise, did the 
expenditure exceed $8,500,000. This was in 1815. 
With the conclusion of peace the naval budget 



I70 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

fell to $4,000,000 ; during the period 1817 to 1846 it 
fluctuated between $3,000,000 and f 6,000,000. The 
second phase of naval as of military finance then 
set in. From 1 846 till the civil war, some 1 1 2,000,000 
were spent annually on the navy ; the year suc- 
ceeding the civil war, 1867, found the expenditure 
$31,000,000 ; in 1874, it was the same, and the last 
year, 1881, for which we have figures, the naval 
expenditure was $15,686,671. 

These results may be best thrown into the 
tabular statement on p. 171, showing the ex- 
penditure at different periods of the history of 
the past century on both the army and navy, and 
the number of troops maintained at the several 
dates. For convenience the sums are given in 
thousands of dollars, smaller sums being omitted. 

However dull statistics may ordinarily be, no 
one can deny that these figures are both in- 
structive and amusing. Many curious financial 
phenomena may be discovered within them. It 
will be observed that while in the year 1850, 10,000 
men of the regular army cost $9,000,000 annually, 
they could not be procured in 1881 for less than 
$20,000,000 ; that reduction in the number of the 
troops signifies an increase in the total expendi- 
ture on the army, and that 20,000 men cost more, 
by many millions, than 27,000, or than 35,000. In 



THE COST OF DEMOCRACY. 



171 



return for this enormous annual expenditure on 
the army there are 20,oco men on paper. Whether 



Year. 


Army. 


Navy. 


Regular 
Army. 


Remarks, 


iSoi 


1,672,000 


2,111,000 


5,144 




I8l2 

i8is 


11,817,000 
14,794,000 


3,957,000 
8,660,000 


11,831 
9,413 


- War with England. 


1817 


8,004,000 


3,314,000 


9,980 




1827 


3,948,000 


4,263,000 


6,184 




1835 


5,759,000 


3,864,000 


7,198 




1837 


13,682,000 


6,646,000 


Do. 




1839 


8,916,000 


6,182,000 


12,539 


Florida War. 


1843 


2,908,000 


3,727,000 


8,613 




1847 


35,840,000 


7,900,000 


17,812 


Mexican War. 


1850 


9,687,000 


7,904,000 


10,320 




1855 


14,648,000 


13,327,000 


Do. 




1859 
i860 


23,154,000 
16,472,000 


14,690,000 
11,514,000 


■12,931 
Do. 


{ Peace Establish- 
( ment. 


1861 


23,000,000 


12,387,000 


Do. 


1862—66 


_ 


_ 


_ 


Civil War. 


1867 


95,224,000 


31,034,000 


54,641 


Peace Establishment. 


1868 


123,246,000 


25,775,000 


52,922 




1869 


78,501,000 


20,000,000 


Do. 




1870 


57,655,000 


21,780,000 


37,313 




1871 


35,799,000 


19,431,000 


35,353 




1872 


35,372,000 


21,249,000 


32,264 




1873 


46,323,000 


23,526,000 


Do. 




1874 


42,313,000 


30,932,000 


Do. 




1875 


41,120,000 


21,497,000 


27,489 




1876 


38,070,000 


18,963,000 


Do. 




1877 


37,082,000 


14,959,000 


Do. 




1878 


32,154,000 


17,365,000 


Do. 




1879 


40,425,000 


15,125,000 


20,000 




1880 


38,116,000 


13,536,000 


Do. 




i88i 


40,466,000 


15,686,000 


Do. 





they really exist or not is unknown, and I have 
never met any one who has seen them. They are 
supposed to be quartered in remote districts of 



172 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

New Mexico, Indian Territory, and Arizona, where 
they probably are the only inhabitants, and where, 
at any rate, there are no critics to count their 
numbers on parade. 

Before leaving military expenditure, there is 
another item to which I would invite the attention 
of English Radicals and the editor of the Financial 
Reform Almanack. This is Pensions. Ini86i,the 
charge for pensions was $1,034,000; in 1862, 
$852,000. At the close of the war, 1867, it had 
risen to $21,000,000; in 1868, to $23,750,000 ; in 
1 87 1, to $34,500,000; in 1878, it had fallen to 
$27,000,000; in 1879, it again rose to $35,000,000; 
in 1880, it reached the prodigious total of 
$56,750,000; and in 1881 it again sank to 
$50,000,000, exceeding by $10,000,000 the total 
expenditure on the army. The physiological 
phenomenon which these figures present is start- 
line enouo;h. At the close of a war, and when the 
distribution of pensions has been once made, the 
Treasury would expect the ordinary laws of mor- 
talit}^ to reduce annually the pension charges. But 
the veterans of the civil war appear to renew their 
strength like the eagles. Not content with im- 
mortality themselves, they have the power of 
dividing and multiplying their individuality like 
zoophytes; and, unless some check on their 



THE COST OF DEMOCRACY. 173 

power of reduplication be discovered, these honest 
warriors will, in twenty years, absorb the whole 
revenue of the United States. 

The expenditure which falls under the head of 
Indians is remarkable. These interesting savages 
cost President Jefferson $31. 22c. in the year 1 800. 
It was not till thirty years later that their charges 
had reached 1 1,000,000 annually. Like the army, 
and unlike the pensioners, their numbers have been 
continually decreasing, and, as above noted, they 
only number at the present time 66,407 souls. Yet, 
like the army and the veterans, their cost con- 
stantly increases. For the decade preceding the 
war, they cost some $3,000,000 annually. They 
now cost $6,000,000, and a few years ago they cost 
between $8,000,000 and $9,000,000. Every Indian 
family should thus receive from the benevolent 
Government about $500 a year, for no ''Indian 
war" expenditure is excluded in the item now 
under discussion. Perhaps if it be roughly esti- 
mated that of the $56,500,000 which are annually 
paid under the head of pensions and Indians, 
$40,000,000 represent unblushing robbery from 
the United States Treasury, we shall be well 
within the truth. At least half of the $40,000,000 
of war expenditure may be assumed to disappear 
in a similar fashion. 



174 1HE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

In the year 1814, when the young Republic 
disputed, not without glory, the dominion of the 
sea with the powerful British Empire, its navy cost 
one-half of what it does to-day. Its peace expen- 
diture was, in 18 18, some $2,000,000 or 83,000,000, 
compared with the $15,000,000 which is now wasted 
on a navy which has neither ships nor guns. Ad- 
miral D. Porter, and other authorities as respect- 
able, declare that the American navy consists of 
officers and water without any ships. It is true 
that the protective tariff has annihilated the mer- 
chant shipping, so that the navy is no longer 
required to protect American commerce abroad, 
but its naval weakness is unworthy the dignity of 
a great country. It is certainly not for the advan- 
tage of England that America should adopt free 
trade and again cover the sea with merchant ships, 
but the day will probably come when the farmers 
of the West and the artisans of the East will unite 
in refusing to pay double prices for almost every 
necessary of life in order to swell the profits of the 
manufacturers. But under a Republic, where the 
minority rule and the majority suffer, the hour of 
deliverance may be far distant. In the meantime, 
the United States can, as a naval power, be hardly 
reckoned in the third rank. Congress appears to 
have awakened to the fact that this state of things 



THE COST OF DEMOCRACY. 175 

is discreditable, and extra grants of large amounts 
are now being proposed to increase the navy. But 
a creeping paralysis has attacked the Executive, and 
Congress votes money in vain. Three and a half 
millions of dollars have been passed for building 
four steel cruisers, one of which, the Dolphin, is 
almost complete. But experts declare the type an 
inferior one ; the engines are unsuited to the ships, 
and there is no authority with power to prevent a 
barren experiment being indefinitely repeated. 
Since the close of the civil war, some $385,000,000 
have been spent upon the navy, more than it 
cost from the foundation of the Republic to 
i860, when it was able to make itself everywhere 
respected. This money might, as Congress has 
itself declared, have been as profitably thrown 
into the sea. 

Can it be matter for surprise that, having regard 
to the profligate expenditure of the past, Mr. 
Randall and the Democratic party he leads in Con- 
gress are opposing the proposed grants to the navy, 
and would even refuse to complete the monitors 
without which the ports are defenceless, or to 
purchase the guns without which the new steel 
cruisers cannot put to sea. 

Such is the cost of Democracy. Up to the date 
of the civil war, some decency was observed in the 



176 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

public expenditure. The result of that unfortunate 
struggle was like a typhoid fever, which alters the 
whole constitution of the sufferer, and not un- 
frequcntly results in rapid consumption. The 
resources of the United States are too vast, and 
the people too energetic, for the one to be speedily 
exhausted or for the other to be vitally affected. 
But the rapid consumption has set in, and has first 
attacked the Treasury. The reckless extravagance 
and robbery of the war demoralised the entire com- 
munity. The people discovered how easy it was to 
rob the national exchequer, and everyone hastened 
to become rich at the public expense. The highest 
officials seem powerless to stem the torrent of cor- 
ruption. Few of them attempt to do so. They 
recall the Cornish parson of Peter Pindar's poem, 
who was preaching when the cry, " A wreck, a 
wreck!" was heard without the church. For a 
moment he attempted vainly to restrain his con- 
gregation, but, finding them beyond control — 

" ' Stop, stop,' cried he, ' at least one prayer : 
Let me get down, and all start fair.'" 



CHAPTER XL 

FOREIGN POLICY. 

It has been seen, in the last chapter, that the 
United States are in no position to take an active 
part in foreign policy, even should they be disposed 
to do so. Their army, costly though it be, is 
only sufficient for home requirements; while the 
navy could not meet on equal terms that of a 
fourth-rate European power. But of the latent 
power of America there can be no doubt : and its 
attitude is so different from that of the French 
Republic, whose restlessness and insolent 
aggression in every quarter of the world is incon- 
veniently conspicuous, that it would be interesting 
to inquire whether apathy or truculence were 
the normal effect of republican institutions. Es- 
pecially is such an inquiry interesting and im- 
portant for England with her tangle of foreign 
relations, and she cannot wisely adopt American 

N 



178 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

institutions without determining what effect they 
would have on her foreign policy. 

We have the most exact descriptions in history 
of the sentiments and conditions of the fighting 
republics of Athens, Sparta, Florence, and Venice ; 
and we must allow its due importance to the fiery 
enthusiasm which carried France triumphantly 
through Europe at the close of the last century. 
But the more attentively these instances are re- 
garded, the more probable does it appear that the 
fierce and aggressive spirit which animated the 
policy of the Greek and Italian republics was 
rather oligarchical and aristocratic than democratic 
in the modern sense of the word. This was 
certainly the case with Italy ; and although it 
cannot be denied that in the little wild-cat republic 
of Athens every freeman had as much opportunity 
of voting and talking as if he had been a member 
of the British Parliament, yet the prevailing temper 
was aristocratic, as was inevitable where a minority of 
freemen rule a majority of slaves. As for France, 
the excitability and .restlessness of her people are 
such as to make her an unsafe illustration of normal 
political phenomena ; yet it may be asserted that, 
while the new-born republican fury had its un- 
doubted effect during the early days of the 
Revolution, chiefly stirred to action by the 



FOREIGN POLICY. 179 

unwarrantable attempt of the European monarchs 
to crush a movement the success of which might 
endanger their own stability, the victories of 
France were mostly won under the Napoleonic 
despotism. The danger to the world from French 
republicanism chiefly arises from the enormous 
proportion of vanity in the character of the people, 
demanding in the national policy constant grati- 
fication. It is a jealous deity destroying those 
who do not burn incense on its altar. Con- 
sequently, Republican France, directed by states- 
men whose ephemeral existence depends on 
popular caprice, is more likely to be aggressive in 
her foreign policy than when controlled by a ruler 
who can sit careless above the thunder of the mob. 
Even he is never safe. The French tiger devours 
his tamer the moment he makes a mistake in 
the performance ; as Napoleon III. discovered to 
his cost. England has never tried a republic ; for 
the experiment between 1650 and 1660 was 
a strict military despotism barely veiled by con- 
stitutionalism. To-day the English are more 
democratic than of old, in that the people have a 
larger voice in the national policy ; but it is difficult 
to say that the country is less loyal, less conser- 
vative, or less disposed to fight for a reasonable* 
or, indeed, an unreasonable, cause. If public 

N 2 



i8o THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

utterances were to be regarded, it might seem that 
the Tory party were more in favour of a bold and 
active foreign policy than the Liberals ; but this 
is extremely questionable, and in opposition to it 
is the fact that among the Liberals themselves, 
putting aside certain eccentric members of Par- 
liament who in no way represent the national 
feeling, the advanced Left is far more thorough, 
aggressive, and imperialistic in matters of foreign 
policy than the moderate Liberals or Whigs, who 
would seem to have adopted the policy of 
qtdeta non movere. 

If the case of America be novv^ considered it will 
be seen that her epoch of aggressiveness in foreign 
policy was while she was practically governed by 
an aristocratic oligarchy. This was previous to the 
war, when the slaveowners of the South dominated 
the political situation ; and they might have retained 
their supremacy till to-day, so weak and spiritless 
was the Northern majority, had they not, in sheer 
wantonness, bullied the North into the war which 
naturally ended in their own destruction. In those 
days the United States were certainly accustomed 
to bounce and bluster a good deal ; but, endeavouring 
to look at their political action with impartial eyes, 
it had about it an air of patriotism and genuine 
national spirit which is less conspicuous under a 



FOREIGN POLICY. i8i 

more popular administration. It is true that the 
war, with all its demoralisation, had a tranquilizing 
effect upon the American temper. The people felt 
that they had at last done a very big thing. They 
had killed and wounded as many men as would 
have satisfied Caesar or Napoleon, and had spent 
on the ennobling operation some six thousand 
eight hundred millions of dollars. It mattered 
little whether the half a million of men who had 
been killed in battle or who died of wounds or 
disease knew for what they had been fighting ; or 
whether the money had, for the most part, gone 
into the pockets of thieves and swindlers who built 
their fortunes on the calamity of the nation. The 
Americans had fairly bought, in fire and blood, the 
right to hold up their heads among the down-trodden 
peoples of the Old World. Like them, they had 
been driven to battle and death for the lying schemes 
of shifty adventurers ; like them, they were heavily 
taxed in order that saloon keepers and shoddy 
contractors might cover their vulgar wives and 
daughters with diamonds. If such glorious results 
do not consohdate and dignify a nation, the 
political theories of England and Europe must 
be mistaken. 

The Monroe doctrine which was, previous to the 
war, the most generally accepted exposition of 



i82 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

American foreign policy, as stated by its founder 
in his seventh annual message, in December, 1823, 
was a wise and reasonable declaration of policy. 
It was directly aimed at Spain and Portugal, whose 
colonial policy is, and ever has been, obnoxious to 
all liberal and enlightened principles, and warned 
them that the great Republic of the West would 
not tolerate their continued efforts to re-conquer 
those South American countries which had, most 
happily, escaped from their rapacious clutches. 
Further, the President of the United States cate- 
gorically informed those Powers that his Govern- 
ment would consider any attempt on their part to 
extend their system to any portion of the Western 
Hemisphere as dangerous to the peace and safety 
of the United States. The policy thus enunciated 
was as successful as it was wise, and Englishmen 
who condemn it may be sure that any British 
Government, under similar circumstances, would 
not only have done as much, but more, for Cuba and 
Hayti would long ago have been annexed to the 
Empire. England would not wish the Monroe 
doctrine to be used, as has sometimes been 
attempted by too zealous Secretaries of State at 
Washington, against herself, and this is natural 
enough. Nor was the Monroe doctrine so designed ; 
and the most ardent Republican could not pretend 



FOREIGN POLICY. 183 

that freedom and civilisation were in danger from 
the extension of the poHtical influence of England. 
The doctrine is one which the two branches of the 
Anglo-Saxon race would do well to preserve and 
fortify rather than contemn and deny. The British 
States of Australia, which a wise statesmanship 
would cease to term or treat as colonies, have 
lately proclaimed the same principle for the South 
Pacific, with the full and cordial approval of the 
majority of their fellow-countrymen in England. 
It is not a paltry question of the transportation to 
New Caledonia of a few thousand French convicts 
that is at issue : this the Australians could easily 
settle for themselves; it is the claim,which will yearly 
be more loudly pressed, that the whole of the South 
Pacific has fallen by fortune to the Anglo-Saxon 
race, which alone has the power to hold and civilise 
it — and that other nations who choose to dispute 
this claim must do so by force of arms. 

The Monroe doctrine, as originally designed, was 
explained by Mr. President Adams in 1826. He 
desired to summon a Congress of American States, 
who should agree to take independent measures 
against the establishment of any future European 
colony within their borders, and thus secure and 
develop the freedom of the new and struggling 
Republics of South America, with which the United 



i84 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

States were naturally in strong sympathy. This 
authoritative declaration of what the Monroe 
doctrine really was, by a member of President 
Monroe's Cabinet, differed very materially from its 
later and more aggressive development, binding the 
United States to resist all colonisation or inter- 
ference by any European Power within the New 
World. The idea of the founders of the doctrine 
was evidently to strengthen the hands of the 
Southern Republics, and to invite each State in 
North or South America to take steps to protect 
itself from foreign intrusion. But the intention of 
a formula which has been altogether changed in 
practical application has little beyond historical 
interest ; and the Monroe doctrine in any shape 
has fallen out of fashion. It was lately dragged 
forth by Mr. Secretary Blaine to frighten the pro- 
moters of the Panama Canal scheme, but was not 
very effective, and was relegated to obscurity. So 
little does the passion for foreign annexation now 
animate Americans, that the occupation of the 
Sandwich Islands by England or Germany would 
not form the subject of remonstrance, though it 
was once a burning question ; and were these 
islands offered to the United States as a free gift, 
it is doubtful whether they would be accepted 
by Congress. 



FOREIGN POLICY. 185 

There is in the foreign policy of America nothing 
unfriendly to England. The good feeling between 
the two countries is fortunately increasing year by 
year, and so long as the States confine their atten- 
tion exclusively to the American continent our 
interests are not likely to clash. Canada is not a 
source of anxiety ; for while, on the one hand, this 
dependency is exceedingly loyal to the Crown, 
there is, on the other, no desire on the part of the 
States to absorb it. Should a policy of annexation, 
contrary to the wish of the Dominion, be ever 
launched, England and Canada will be quite able 
to take care of themselves. 

The large and rapidly increasing German popula- 
tion of the States may have a tranquillising effect 
on American relations with England, and to some 
extent neutralise the Irish element ; for there can 
be little doubt that English sentiment is tending 
towards the natural alliance with Germany as op- 
posed to France, who, since she has adopted repub- 
lican institutions, has proved herself worthless as an 
ally. We can have no true sympathy with France, 
whose attitude towards us is uniformly unfriendly, 
and whose interests are opposed to ours in every 
quarter of the world ; while with Germany we have 
the bond of a common origin, creed, and interests. 

The sentimental regard for the Russian Govern- 



i86 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

ment, which was once so strongly and fre- 
quently expressed in America, has died out. It 
was always an unnatural and artificial growth, and 
had its origin in the astuteness of Russia attempt- 
ing to make political capital out of the mistakes of 
the upper classes in England, who, for reasons 
which need not here be discussed, gave their 
sympathy and moral support to the Southern 
Democrats in the civil war. Russia, who foresaw 
the inevitable result of the struggle, sided warmly 
with the North, and earned a cheap gratitude, 
which for some time made an imposing display. 
But the farce was played out with the return of 
cordiality between England and America, for it 
was impossible that either of these nations should 
long regard with any other sentiment than disgust 
the domestic policy of Russia. It was an evil day 
for the Liberal party in England when fortune 
compelled it to appear as the advocate of Russian 
fraud and aggression in south-eastern Europe, to 
champion a Power whose hostility to England is 
deep-seated and inveterate, and whose political 
methods are abhorrent to every sentiment of 
Liberalism. America and England have both 
fallen into the same snare, and we may hope that 
for them, at least, the fowler may in future spread 
his nets in vain. 



FOREIGN POLICY. ^ 187 

Great as the evils of the political system in 
America may be, and serious as are the dangers 
which lie before the Republic, the people are far 
too energetic and high-spirited to view them with 
any unworthy alarm. The pride in the greatness 
and wealth of their country which is felt and 
expressed by Americans, their confidence in its 
future, and the equanimity with which they regard 
the dangers or troubles of the hour, are admirable 
to behold, and are qualities which in themselves go 
far to deserve and command national good-fortune- 
Nor is their pride and confidence exaggerated or 
unfounded. They possess a country immense in 
extent and of unparalleled richness. In its virgin 
soil ' and limitless prairies are an inexhaustible 
treasury, a cornucopia from which fatness and 
abundance for ever flow, while in no part of the 
world is found such varied mineral wealth. The 
harvest of field and mine is reaped by an intel- 
ligent, industrious, and energetic people, whose 
territory stretches from ocean to ocean, and this 
generation will see within its borders one hundred 
millions of English-speaking people, who will 
doubtless be prosperous, and who, if they be wise 
in time, may be also free. 

England, who has girdled the earth with empire, 
and the roots of whose national oak lie, like those 



i88 THE GREAT REPUBLIC. 

of the mystic tree in Norse sagas, among the 
hidden bases of the world, can look without fear, 
or distrust, or envy, but rather with a glad and 
generous pride, at the development of the great 
American people, bone of her bone, and blood of 
her blood. And if England can find nothing 
worthy of adoption in the political system of 
America, she can yet take care that she does not 
fall behind in that noble and confident spirit which 
is the birthright of imperial races, and which 
enables them to look indifferently on good or evil 
fortune. There are Englishmen who seem to 
believe that the golden age has passed for their 
country, and that she is falling into decrepitude. 
This is not the view of those who have breathed 
the free air of the younger and greater Britain in 
Canada, Australia, or India. It is not the spirit 
which breathes in Lord Dufferin's Canadian 
speeches, or in the admirable address lately de- 
livered by Lord Lome before the Colonial Institute, 
or which inspires the patriotic resolve of Australia 
to not only share the glory but the burthens of 
the mother-country. The British Empire is still in 
its infancy. Grafted, it is true, on an ancient 
monarchy, it only dates from the occupation of 
Virginia by Raleigh three hundred years ago. It 
has grown to be the greatest empire the world has 



FOREIGN POLICY. 189 

ever seen, with a territory of 9,000,000 square miles, 
and 300,000,000 subjects of the Queen, and now 
only waits the statesman whose genius shall gather 
it into one mighty federation, animated by loyalty 
and dignified by freedom. When that day shall 
come we may hope that the united Anglo-Saxon 
race, English and American, will join hands across 
the Atlantic, and, disdaining all possible occasion 
of quarrel, cement a lasting alliance which will 
insure the peace and progress of the world. 



THE END. 



LONDON : R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS. 



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